How long could you hold your hand in this oven?

TDLR: If all you came here for was to quickly choose a temperature equivalent to “quiet oven”, try 325° to 350°.

One of the problems we run into when trying to use cookbooks from the 1800s and earlier is how completely different their environment was from ours. They make assumptions about what the reader is familiar with that are often for all practical purposes a complete inversion over our own experience.

In A Centennial Meal I provided an 1876 cornbread recipe, but I modified the recipe to be baked. The original recipe…

…involves steaming the cornbread rather than baking it, which is likely to be an entirely different texture! It would also be more work and not something I’d want to do in July in Texas. It highlights a big difference between today and 1876: it was probably easier in some cases to boil bread then than it was to start up the oven, get it to the right point in the oven’s cooling process, and bake.

Stoves in the past required fire. It required starting a fire and then managing a fire. You can see something similar in the instructions for making tapioca custard in Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Receipt Book for 1876. Instead of cooking the tapioca for several minutes, her French Tapioca Custard soaks it in cold water for five hours. The latter takes a lot more time and planning, but it also doesn’t require starting a fire and getting it just right.

Similarly, you almost never see the phrase “room temperature” in older recipes. Everything’s already at room temperature, or close to it. The difficulty with butter or milk isn’t softening it or souring it. The difficulty is keeping it firm or “sweet”. Older recipes call for sweet milk because sweet milk is difficult. By default, butter is soft. By default, milk goes sour.

This leads to other things that older recipe authors don’t mention, such as not telling the reader how much salt to add. The problem for a nineteenth century dish is not making sure there’s enough salt. It’s making sure there isn’t too much. Salt is in everything. In the absence of refrigeration, salt is one of the most common preservatives. It’s in everything from butter to meat to vegetables. The cook already knew they had to remove salt, not add it.

Another experience we have that is entirely different from theirs is oven temperature. Reading oven temperatures in older recipes drives modern bakers crazy! Before the advent of regulated gas ovens and then regulated electric ovens, there was no such thing as a steady temperature unless the oven had been brought up to a hot temperature and was still being fed—and that very carefully. Most ovens were used at various points in the process of cooling down.

Starts using temperatures, ends using pre-temperature terminology. But a quiet oven in this (very late) use of the term appears to be a hot oven that’s been turned off long enough for you to fill puff paste. (Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial, October 13, 1949)

When a recipe tells you to use a hot oven, or a moderate oven, or a cooling oven, they’re not telling you what temperature to use. They’re telling you when in the oven’s cooling process to use the oven for this particular dish. Dishes were baked in order according to which needed a hotter oven, and which needed or could make do with a cooler oven. Often, they also told you where in the oven to put it, much like a barbecue recipe tells you where to put the food in relation to the coals.

There’s technically no reason that these terms have to describe temperature or heat even tangentially. I could easily imagine a “quiet” oven being one that’s no longer being jostled around by adding and removing items or by adding and removing fuel! That would make translation into modern recipes even more difficult than such translation already is.

Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The 1876 Buckeye Cook Book describes using an oven this way:

The Oven

Too much care cannot be given to the preparation of the oven, which is oftener too hot than too cool… A good plan is to fill the stove with hard wood, let it burn until there is a good body of heat, and turn damper so as to throw the heat to the bottom of oven for fully ten minutes before the cake is put in. In this way a steady heat to start with is secured. Generally it is better to close the hearth when the cake is put in, as this stops the draft and makes a more regular heat. Keep adding wood in small quantities, for if the heat becomes slack, the cake will be heavy. Great care must be taken, for some stoves need to have the dampers changed every now and then, but as a rule, more heat is needed in the bottom of the oven than in the top. (pages 69-70)

In other words, cakes, which are among the recipes where the term “quiet” is used, do need a steady heat; a quiet oven cannot be one that is just left alone. The oven needed constant fiddling. The writers of The Buckeye Cook Book recognized the desirability of something better. They went on to write:

Many test their ovens in this way: if the hand can be held in from twenty to thirty-five seconds (or while counting twenty or thirty-five) it is a quick oven, from thirty-five to forty-five seconds is “moderate,” and from forty-five to sixty seconds is “slow;” thirty-five seconds is a good oven for large fruit cakes. All systematic housekeepers will hail the day when some enterprising Yankee or Buckeye girl shall invent a stove or range with a thermometer attached to the oven, so that the heat may be regulated accurately and intelligently. (The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, page 70; the emphasis on the last sentence is mine.)

I suspect that the need to make use of a cooling oven is one of the reasons meringues were popular for dessert. They used the oven at its coolest, and so would have been the last items to go in. I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial response of a 19th century cook to a modern oven would be, “but when do you put the meringue in?”

The ability to trust a steady temperature in an oven isn’t just an improvement. It’s a paradigm shift. Their oven preparation process, and the terminology they used to describe it, was built around a process that simply doesn’t exist in modern kitchens. All those oven conversion tables of phrase to temperature miss the point: the phrase isn’t entirely a temperature. There were, in fact, some authors of manuals for modern regulated ovens who refused to provide conversion tables. The Estate Stove Company’s 1925 Estate Cook Book began on page 2 with:

Such terms as “slow” oven, “fast” oven, “moderate” oven are not found in modern cook-books. They are too hazy and indefinite. Instead, exact temperatures are specified.

Such homely, old-fashioned expedients as testing the oven by a piece of manila paper—“when it becomes the proper shade of brown,” or by a teaspoonful of flour—“if it browns while I count forty, the oven is just hot enough for bread,” are merely poor makeshifts. There is nothing scientific about them; nothing accurate; nothing certain; nothing dependable.

The Estate Cook Book didn’t contain a conversion chart. Why would it? Any such chart would be inaccurate, uncertain, and undependable!

Since I’m using a lot of older recipes for my Sestercentennial posts, when someone asked about “quiet ovens” on Seasoned Advice, I thought it might be both interesting and useful to do some research.

“Quiet” was a very rare term for baking. It appears to have been limited to the British Commonwealth, and even then isn’t nearly as common as the other terms vintage recipe aficionados have to deal with. We think of quiet as being low, because it’s a low volume. But that is not necessarily what it meant for ovens. Remember, it’s not so much a temperature as a process. Where in an unregulated oven’s heating or cooling process would it be “quiet”?

Spoiler: I’m not going to have an answer to that. Everything is guesswork. Much of this is how I try to make an educated guess from guesswork.

I don’t particularly trust modern authors who toss off equivalences for these old oven terms without any reason behind it. They’ve likely never used non-temperature-regulated ovens. But there are a few relatively modern authors who think they know the answer. Bob Brown’s 1955 The Complete Book of Cheese states on page 118 that a quiet oven is a moderate oven:

Bake 1 hour in a “quiet” oven, as the English used to say for a moderate one, and when done set aside for 12 hours before eating.

And in his 2011 Small Adventures in Cooking James Ramsden writes about a vintage recipe:

It also suggests that sponge should be baked in ‘a quiet oven’, which is a lovely but useless instruction, bless.

His version of the recipe uses an oven temperature of 170°C, which is technically 338°F. This would, of course, almost certainly be rounded up or down to either or 350° or 325° in cookbooks that use Fahrenheit.

The Internet Archive has entries that include the term from 1853 and into the 1900s, though some of the latter are reprints of earlier recipes. The earliest reference I found on the Internet Archive is Miss Crawford’s 1853 French Cookery Adapted for English Families. On page 181 her Petits Patés Hot recipe reads:

Having prepared your paste as directed, roll it out very thin, cut it out with a paste-cutter in rounds as large as a crown piece, put two or three rounds one on the other, with a little minced meat, of what kind you please in each, cover it, moisten the edges with beaten yolk of egg, egg them over, and bake in a quiet oven.

“Light sponge cakes, and all light cakes, must have a quiet oven, as well as all large cakes which contain much baking powder. The lighter the cake is, in general the quieter the oven should be.” (Household Cookery, p. 95)

Later, Margaret Black’s 1882 Household Cookery and Laundry Work has at least three references to a quiet oven. From page 95,

Light sponge cakes, and all light cakes, must have a quiet oven, as well as all large cakes which contain much baking powder. The lighter the cake is, in general the quieter the oven should be.

That sounds a lot like “quieter” means “cooler”. There are two recipes that call for quiet ovens on the facing pages at 100-101, one for a baking powder seed cake and one for a sponge cake.

Mix thoroughly, and pour into a prepared tin, and bake till ready in a quiet oven.

…

Butter a cake-tin and dust it with fine sugar; pour in the mixture, and bake in a very quiet oven till ready—about half-an-hour, perhaps.

The term even appears in a poem by Walter Eldred Warde, in his 1885 Lines Grave and Gray, an ode to the muffin man. I have no idea what most of this poem refers to, which means it isn’t going to provide much of a clue as to what a quiet oven actually is. But it is a fascinating if cryptic look at the commerce of baking in whatever period Warde was referring to. On the one hand, it sounds eighteenth-century to me; on the other, it sounds like a bit of commerce Warde had personally experienced.

• • What Might Be

• • O Muffin Man! with well-stocked tray,
  • Who passes at the close of day
  • Adown our square,
  • Tell me the secret of that bell,
  • Thou ring’st with ever dreadful knell
  • In frosty air.
• • Why does the dustman only bellow,
  • And almost crack his lungs, poor fellow!
  • While thou dost ring?
  • Thou crumpet-knight, with jaunty cap,
  • Who pourest treasures in cook’s lap,
  • Solve me this thing.
• • Thou canst not; then I’ll tell you why,
  • At least to do so I must try—
  • I’ve got it now:
  • In quiet oven you do bake,
  • And think your ‘calling’ doesn’t make
  • Enough of row.
• • Ring on, then, in your ‘muffin style,’
  • And dustman bellow, all the while
  • I read theology;
  • If all the criers join with you,
  • We’ll have a something all out new
  • In campanology.

The adjective “quiet” wasn’t limited to baking. In May Byron’s 1914/1915 Pot-luck/or the British Home Cookery Book she writes about boiling meat that the uniform heat required “is not boiling but quiet simmering. Meat boiled is meat spoiled.”

The November 29, 1908 Inter Ocean.

It is a ridiculously uncommon term even among those who used it: in all of her 427 pages, Byron used the term “quiet” twice. Once for the above-mentioned low simmer, and once (page 353) for baking Kent Lemon Buns. She used the terms slow oven, moderate oven, quick oven, hot oven, good oven, fierce oven, crisp oven, steady oven, brisk oven, cool oven, moderately hot oven, fairly quick oven, slack oven, gentle oven, very slow oven, moderately heated oven, good hot oven, rather hot oven, sharp oven, over-heated oven, nice hot oven, and just plain “oven” over 200 times.

I’d love to talk to three random cooks from the era and ask them to rate those terms. It’s difficult to believe that all of those terms could be differentiated from each other or were even meant to be differentiated.

Newspapers.com also shows several recipes that call for a “quiet oven”, including one “relatively quiet oven”.¹ There’s one clue to the temperature that quiet ovens represented in the September 5, 1896 London Reader of Literature, Science, Art and General Information. On page 503², there are answers to correspondence. One answer specifically contrasts a “very quiet oven” to ovens that are “too hot”:

GINGER.—The reason your loaf sinks in the middle is that your oven may be too hot; gingerbread requires a very quiet oven; you see the treacle melts and so does the sugar, and if your oven is too hot it cooks quickly round the edges and draws the flour away from the middle; when eggs are in it they more quickly cook, and to some extent prevent it sinking; probably in your plain gingerbread you have scarcely enough flour; a little more would make it all right.

Early oven manuals occasionally contained conversion charts, tables that both corresponded older terms to modern temperatures and tables that corresponded baked goods to specific temperatures. While I was unable to find any that include “quiet” in their tables, many do contain “moderate” and “gingerbread”. Gingerbread recipes are surprisingly consistent. Occident Flour’s ca. 1920 Occident Cake Recipes, on page 3, places gingerbread under the column for “slow” ovens, or “250°F.—325°F.—350°F.”. Both the ca. 1925 Universal Electric Range Instruction Cook Book and Pyrofax Gas’s ca. 1930 Cooking Made Easier place gingerbread at 350° in their charts on pages 15 and 32, respectively.

The Estate Cook Book’s two gingerbreads (page 10) bake at 350° and at 325°.

Various terms, including “quiet”, were compared for making cakes in the November 29, 1908 Chicago Inter Ocean and the December 16, 1908 edition of the London, Middlesex London Evening News:

…Large cakes should be put into a moderate oven.

If put into a very hot oven the outside will be browned and the inside left uncooked. Light sponge cakes and all light cakes must have a quiet oven, as well as large cakes which contain much baking powder.

A very light cake put into a quick oven rises rapidly round the sides, but leaves a hollow in the center.

This appears to differentiate “quiet” ovens from “moderate”, “quick”, or “very hot” ovens. “Quiet” is definitely cooler than “very hot” and probably cooler than “quick”, but it’s unclear how it compares to “moderate”.

From the December 2, 1924, Australian Woman’s Mirror.

How much can be gleaned from that is murky, however, because the text on quiet ovens is almost verbatim from the much earlier Household Cookery. Had they actually done any testing, or did they just crib from an earlier work?

There are two potentially more useful references to quiet ovens in an article on Christmas cakes on page 24 of the December 2, 1924, issue of The Australian Woman’s Mirror. The introduction contains advice on temperatures for baking cakes that includes:

The oven should be hot, if it is a gas oven, when the cake is put in, and then the flame should be lowered to ensure a quiet, steady heat, so that the cake will not need attention for at least half an hour. In a fuel stove a moderate heat should be maintained throughout.

This can be reasonably interpreted as corroboration both that a quiet oven is cooler—the flame is lowered to produce one—and that a quiet oven is at least similar to a moderate oven. If we assume that a “quiet, steady heat” is what quiet ovens produce, then a moderate oven is an upper limit to what a quiet oven represents.

In the recipe for Rich Christmas Cake that immediately follows, the baking instructions are:

…bake in a quiet oven from 3 to 4 hours.

The lack of explicit baking powder or soda in the recipe makes it difficult to compare to modern recipes³, but that long of a baking time likely places a quiet oven in the middle of, or at the low end of, a moderate oven.

The clues I’ve found are somewhat contradictory, at least potentially. Is the “very” quiet oven that is required for gingerbread going to have a higher or lower temperature than a merely “quiet” oven? Because the author is telling the questioner that they were probably using too hot of an oven, I suspect that “very” quiet means cooler rather than hotter. If so, and if a gingerbread’s 325° to 350° is a “very quiet” oven, then a merely “quiet” oven would likely be 350° to 375°.

This somewhat matches James Ramsden’s 170C which is likely to be translated to either 325F or 350F, since recipes that use Fahrenheit tend to use even multiples of 25.

While “quiet” doesn’t seem to have been common anywhere, it was relatively more common in Australia. One of the more fascinating recipes I ran across during my research was a 1930 recipe in the June 10, 1930 Canberra Times for “Scotch Shortbread”. The recipe uses wheat flour and rice flour, as well as baking powder. As far as I could tell, it was both a standard shortbread recipe and a very unique one.

Canberra Rice Shortbread

Servings: 18
Preparation Time: 1 hour
Scotch Shortbread (Canberra Times, June 10 1930) (PNG, 257.9 KB)

Ingredients

• 6 oz flour
• 2 oz rice flour
• 4 oz butter
• 2 oz sugar
• ¼ tsp baking powder

Steps

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together.
2. Cut in the butter.
3. Rub and knead together with your hands.
4. Shape into a flat cake by hand—no rolling pin— about an inch thick.
5. Bake at 325° for about half an hour.
6. Score for cutting into pieces, and cool.

“Scotch Shortbread” is a common name and a common dish. I found several recipes that were very similar, in some ways exact—but not with rice flour. I couldn’t initially find any similar rice shortbread recipes in my other cookbooks or online.

This year, while traveling, I ran across Jo Ann Shirley’s Wonderful Ways to Prepare Biscuits & Cookies. Shirley was an Australian author, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a “Rice Shortbread” in her book that looks very similar, proportionally, to the Canberra Times recipe. It lacks only the baking powder.

Wonderful Rice Shortbread

Servings: 36
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Wonderful ways to prepare Biscuits & Cookies (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 2-½ cups flour
• 1 cup rice flour
• 1 cup butter
• ⅓ cup sugar
• confectioners sugar

Steps

1. Sift together the all-purpose flour, rice flour and sugar four times.
2. Cut the butter into the dry ingredients until well-blended.
3. Pat with your hands into a rectangle about ¾ inch (2 cm) thick.
4. Cut into shapes desired (about 1-½ inch diameter) and place on a cookie sheet.
5. Bake in a 325°F (160°C) oven for about 15 minutes.
6. Sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar and allow to cool completely.

Two and a half cups of flour is about 12 ounces. 1 cup of rice flour is about 4 ounces. 1 cup of butter is eight ounces. In other words, Shirley’s rice shortbread is a doubled version of the Canberra Times shortbread. The only difference, besides a lack of baking powder, is that ⅓ cup of sugar is about 2.4 ounces. This means 1.2 ounces in Shirley’s recipe compared to the 2 ounces in the Canberra Times. But Shirley’s shortbread is also dusted with powdered sugar, and that isn’t mentioned in the Canberra Times recipe.⁴

Shirley’s rice shortbread recipe calls for 325° for about 15 minutes compared to the Canberra Times’s quiet oven for about half an hour. Shirley’s version is both thinner than the 1930 Canberra recipe—¾-inch instead of 1-inch thick—it also cuts the dough into many small cakes instead of one large one. The lack of baking powder will also make a difference—though the fact that the dry ingredients are sifted together four times will add some extra rise.⁵

Realizing that rice in shortbread was likely an Australian variation, I went back to my one Australian community cookbook, the ca. 1970 Jet Age Cookbook of the Royal Australian Air Force Women’s Association. Sure enough: I didn’t find it originally because it’s titled “Scottish” Shortbread instead of “Scotch”. It reduces the flour from 6 ounces to 4 ounces, and jettisons the baking powder. But it’s otherwise the same recipe as in the Canberra Times. It bakes for 20-25 minutes at an unspecified temperature.

Glen Powell recently said that substituting rice flour for some or all of the wheat flour in a baked good was once common in the United Kingdom back in the 1800s and earlier. It looks like adding rice flour to shortbread, at least, has continued into the seventies and eighties in the Australian tradition.

It also seems that the temperature must be around 325°—as in Jo Ann Shirley’s recipe—to somewhere around 325° to 350°. Unspecified baking temperatures are often 350° in the United States, and, apparently from 325° to 375° for cakes and muffins in Australia.

I love shortbread. I decided to make both the Jo Ann Shirley and the Canberra Times recipes, using 325° for both, and compare cooking times, texture, and flavor.

Jo Ann Shirley’s Wonderful shortbread cookies get better the day after and two days after.

The Canberra shortbread is very delicate. I don’t know if it’s better two days after—they were gone by the first day.

“About an inch thick.”

Shirley’s version has what appears to be a ridiculously short baking time, 15 minutes at 325°. However, it also calls for baking them as small cookies, and for letting the cookies cool on the cookie sheet. The recipe specifies that it makes 3 dozen cookies. To do that required using a circle to cut them into about 1-½-inch diameter rounds.

Baking these cookies at 325° for 25 minutes produced wonderful shortbread cookies. I think they would have been done at 20. They were slightly overbrowned on the bottom. Given variations in ovens and cookie sheet density this means it’s probably within the realm of Shirley’s 15 minutes.

The Canberra Times recipe is thicker—an inch is getting close to cake territory—so it’s not surprising that it takes twice the time for the same amount of ingredients. They also required no adjustment to the baking time in my oven. I baked them at 325° for exactly thirty minutes.

Because these recipes make thick shortbread, they’re also sort of layered, with the section near the sheet being necessarily browner than near the top. They end up looking and being flakey, which improves the texture over thinner shortbread cookies.

My conclusion is that 325° to 350° is likely to be a good range for those rare times when a recipe calls for a quiet oven. Using 325° for the Canberra shortbread worked perfectly with the time given in the recipe.

My other conclusion is that Australian rice shortbread is a great shortbread.