Sick of banana bread? Try this 1932 recipe for a six-ingredient peanut butter loaf instead

The decades-old recipe has resurfaced on Reddit and bakers are loving it

How to make the yeast-free, six-ingredient peanut butter loaf that appeared in the 1932 version of 'Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking' by Elizabeth Driver. Step one: mix your dry ingredients. All photos by Katy Gillett / The National

Step two: add milk

Step three: add peanut butter (crunchy or smooth, it's up to you)

Step four: mix both dry and wet ingredients together well

Step five: grease whatever loaf tin or baking dish you have available at home

Step six: put in your mixture

Step seven: put in a preheated oven and bake for an hour or more

Step eight: pull it out and marvel at your handiwork

Step nine: Slice it up, smear it with butter and enjoy

Zoom chats, family quiz nights and baking bread: these three activities are becoming a lockdown staple for many across the world amid the coronavirus crisis.

But while thousands have turned their attention to the art of perfecting banana bread, many more have rediscovered a decades-old recipe for a yeast-free, six-ingredient peanut butter loaf. And it’s going down a treat on the internet.

The recipe might date back to 1932, but if two things in this world are timeless, they’re peanut butter and bread.

It was first printed in the Canadian Depression-era cookbook Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking by Elizabeth Driver, and was posted on Reddit last year. It recently resurfaced in the Old Recipes subreddit and on Glen & Friends Cooking.

According to the food channel's host Glen, Five Roses was published in 1913 as a community cookbook and was in print until 1967.

“They got Canadian housewives to send in their favourite recipes,” he explains in the video.

The recent Reddit post is titled: "Ran out of bread under lockdown so we made the (delicious) peanut butter bread!"

It was posted by a user in South Africa who said: “This bread tastes delicious with a smear of butter and will be great for snacks or a sweet breakfast.” They said it’s a “bit more cakey” than regular bread, “but would be great as a [peanut butter] sandwich”.

People from across the world chipped in with other suggestions. “Try it with some Nutella! You can thank me later,” one commenter wrote.

“I had mine with some Pan di Stelle Crema [chocolate hazelnut spread] and it was amazing,” wrote another.

Other suggestions included added chocolate chips, raisins and even a banana. Users also substituted dairy milk with almond milk, which they said “worked well”.

Here’s the recipe from Reddit in full:

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 cup sugar

4 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/3 cup milk

1/2 cup peanut butter (Note: Glen recommended adding a little more in the video, so we added another big spoonful)

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 160°C;
2. Mix together dry ingredients;
3. Mix in the milk, followed by the peanut butter;
4. Scrape into a greased loaf pan and bake for about one hour.

Take a look through the photo gallery above to see a step-by-step guide to making this peanut butter loaf.

We tried out the recipe ourselves, and can attest to the above. It is delicious, more cake-like and works well with a smear of butter on the top.

One note we will add is that our gas-powered oven doesn’t even go down to 160°C, so we baked at 170°C and still had to turn it up after an hour to continue baking.

It ended up taking us close to two hours to complete. So the temperature and length of time it takes will very much depend on your oven's capabilities.

But it’s worth the wait.