#encylopedia of milwaukee

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Cooking with Lizzie Black Kander 

While Lizzie Black Kander earned the moniker of “Jane Addams of Milwaukee” for her social work with Milwaukee’s Russian Jewish immigrants, Kander is most famous for writing the Settlement Cookbook in which she compiled many of the recipes developed and used at the Settlement House.

The UW-Milwaukee Archives holds Kander’s papers, which include her notebooks with early recipes and menu plans, and our sibling department, @uwmspeccoll, holds several later editions of the Settlement Cookbook.

Most of the time we pull out Kander’s papers and cookbooks to teach about primary source analysis, but in this instance we decided to cook with them instead!  

Our reference and instruction archivist, Abbi, decided on a Milwaukee Rye Bread for her foray into cooking with Kander.  The recipe is interesting for a number of reasons.  Rye flour is low in gluten, so it’s often mixed with a higher percentage of wheat flour, which allows the bread to develop a lighter structure and rise better.  Kander’s recipe uses only 2 cups of wheat flour, to which she adds 4 cups of rye flour and a cup of riced potatoes, resulting in an extremely dense loaf.  

Kander would have had access to plenty of fresh flour for her bread in Milwaukee.  The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee notes: 

By the early 1860s, the city had become the largest shipper of wheat in the world. And the Grain Exchange, an imposing structure located in downtown Milwaukee, “influenced the price of farm commodities internationally.” 

Milwaukee soon also became a center for the processing of food crops. Flour was the first agricultural product to be processed large-scale in the city. By 1870, local output of flour had reached 1.2 million barrels, and the city trailed only St. Louis as a milling center.

Kander’s recipe calls for an ounce of cake yeast, which she most likely sourced from Milwaukee’s National Distilling (later Red Star Yeast).  The bread also uses the water from the cooked potatoes, which makes the recipe vegan-friendly (at least until you slather the bread with butter).  Finally, the bread is brushed with water after baking, a technique that helps to seal the crust and allow the bread to stay fresh longer. 

Exploring Milwaukee through the lens of food history is fun and delicious!  If any of our readers decide to cook from an edition of the Settlement Cookbook, we hope you’ll share your results with us!