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*BETTER-BUTTER is an easy-spreading mixture of butter and oil, a favorite recipe from Laurel’s Kitchen. Blend 1 cup oil with 1 cup soft butter; to keep it firm longer at room temperature, include 2 tablespoons each, water and non-instant milk powder, and ¼ teaspoon lecithin; ½ teaspoon salt is optional.

Fruits, Nuts & Seeds

No one needs to be told that raisins and walnuts and caraway seeds have a special place in the world of breads. Every homeland and almost every holiday boasts some particularly wonderful fruited or seeded or nutted bread all its own, with the fragrance of tradition to enhance the enjoyment of every bite. We have not attempted to include many such recipes—the best of them are your own family secrets—but if you are longing to make a wonderful bread that has form in your mind, but no name (and no recipe), a dozen fancy books of recipes will never supply it as readily as the application of your imagination and experience can; and if you’re a little short on that, this section hopes to fill you in.

Making breads that are laced with fruits is a sure way to win high marks with the eaters, but it can be tricky, and what promises opulence, if not glory, can betray you with a weighty, gooey, or holey loaf—not at all what you had in mind. We hope that the tips in this section will help you produce exactly the bread you did have in mind, or at least one that pleases as much as it surprises you.

This writing is just now being haunted by a tiny strawberry-blond fairy-godmother figure named Joan, a friend in the old days in Berkeley. She fell into breadmaking with vast enthusiasm, following no rules whatever, and was delighted with the results whatever they were. Her loaves were always freestanding, free-form, unutterably dense, and so packed with fruits and seeds and other marvelous things that when she pressed a chunk (there was no question of slicing) into your hand and asked with shining eyes if this wasn’t the most incredible bread you’d ever eaten, you had to agree.

There is a bit of Joan in most of us, thank goodness, but there’s a prudent streak too, and in these days of soaring prices and shrinking hours, usually we would rather make sure the loaves we lavish our time and money on are going to be light as well as tasty, edible as well as incredible, free from holes and goo, and sliceable, even toasterable and sandwichable—though none the less special for that when there are raisins and nuts on the scene.

We are veterans of literally hundreds of loaves of raisin bread, and have done a bit of research, too, to try to understand and explain some of the quirks as well as some of the special talents of natural fruits, nuts, and seeds. In this section we talk about how to use them to their best advantage, giving recipes we have developed and like very much, to serve both as examples and as springboards to your own creations. The section groups fruits with nuts and seeds not because they have much in common as ingredients but because they complement each other so beautifully. When one is included, adding another is simply the logical thing to do.

ONE WORD ABOUT CINNAMON

(Which is not a fruit, not a nut, not a seed.)

Though it is probably the favorite of all the sweet spices, cinnamon is after all made of ground-up tree bark, so don’t add it to dough along with the flour, or it can tear up the gluten and reduce the bread’s rise. In addition, cinnamon reacts with yeast dough in a mysterious way, producing a metallic flavor that is extremely unpleasant to those who are sensitive to it. As you’ll see, we like to add cinnamon when the loaf is being shaped, either as a dusting on the crust, or rolled into the loaf in a delicate swirl.

Fruits

When we think of fruit in bread, raisins come instantly to mind, and in fact they are hard to beat. Other very flavorful fruits shine, too: dates, of course, apricots, prunes and currants. Fruits with subtler flavors like apple or pear can make a less showy but very good contribution when as juice or stew