Portuguese Honey Bread, Revisited

Bolo de mel. 
Photo by TeWeBs, found on Wikimedia Commons

Back in 2010, I posted a recipe that my mother found in an issue of Good Housekeeping magazine back in the 1970s called "Portuguese Honey Bread."  The recipe, as a look at my post will show, had some unusual ingredients, as well as more normal ingredients in unusual quantities.  11 cups of flour! A 1/4 cup of cinnamon (and the recipe said "yes, 1/4 cup")!  A third of a cup of cold mashed potatoes!  And  a half a cup of sherry.  Most of the ingredients are dry ingredients; there are less than 3 cups of wet ingredients in the whole thing, not counting the butter (in a generous amount) and the mashed potatoes.  The bread was nearly uncuttable fresh out of the oven, but after being wrapped up and aged for about a week, it became a wonderful, dense, spice bread.

This week I decided to see whether I could get any more information about the recipe.  Is this a traditional Portuguese recipe, or was the adjective "Portuguese" just put in the name to catch readers' eyes?

I have still not found more information as to whether the recipe is traditional--but I did find other "Portuguese Honey Bread" recipes.  Other than the fact that they are all spice breads or cakes, those recipes are different from the one my mother and I made--some dramatically so.  Some of them I had stumbled upon back in 2010 when I was first exploring the recipe.

One can be read on Epicurious.  It has no mashed potatoes, only a tame quarter teaspoon of cinnamon, and only 4 1/2 cups of flour.  It does have alcohol--a quarter-cup of port, instead of the half cup of sherry in the recipe we made.  And it has three large eggs--which the GH recipe we tried did not.  The Epicurious recipe recommends double wrapping the bread as we did, but for the sake of preserving it, not for aging purposes.

I found another recipe on a blog called Tea With Friends.  The blogger claimed that she found the recipe in a 1969 issue of Good Housekeeping which she found at a yard sale.  Since that date was close enough to the date I recalled of my experiment with my mother, I was very interested.  Further, the blog post containing the recipe she used showed a page from the magazine, with a photograph of a completed bread that had been baked in a pan made so that a sculpted rose would appear on the finished cake, and that photograph looked familiar to me.  

But the recipe she gives is quite different from the one Mom and I made!  It had most of the same ingredients--including the sherry and mashed potatoes--but in much more modest proportions.  Four and one-half cups of flour.  A bare two tablespoons of sherry.  Two tablespoons of mashed potatoes.  Significantly less sugar than in the recipe my mother and I made.  And so on.  Speaking of potatoes, here's one that substitutes instant potatoes for the mashed potatoes, over at Ukrainian Classic Kitchen and International Cuisine.

A fourth recipe, found on the blog Eliot's Eats, is attributed to Gourmet Today.  It's different from the those previously discussed.  It requires three eggs, for one thing (the others have no eggs).  It contains port, like the Epicurious recipe, and about one and one-half cups of dried fruit (cranberries, mixed candied fruits), and modest amounts of spices.  Unlike the others, it also contains yeast (the blogger calls it a "quick bread/yeast bread hybrid").

Finally, from Food.com comes a recipe titled "Pao de Mel (Portuguese Honey Bread)."  This recipe uses only three cups of flour, a bit of cloves (or nutmeg, your choice), and chocolate, in addition to other ingredients.  There are no other spices and no mashed potatoes, fruit, or alcohol among those other ingredients.

I could probably go on, but I'm sure my readers get the idea.  

A quick web search for "Portuguese bread" turned up a number of pages, including several pages of the list of "Portuguese breads of note" variety.  Apparently, the Portuguese love breads, both sweet and savory.  

It's certainly possible that the recipe my mother and I used was an erroneous redaction of the 1969 GH recipe that got printed in a slightly later issue of the magazine.  But what of the other recipes?  Which comes closest to the original--if indeed there can be said to be an "original" recipe?  And do any of these recipes have any connection with Portugal, or the Portuguese?  All of the recipes include honey, and Portugal produces some very fine honey.  Perhaps in Portugal any "quick" bread that contains honey is a "Portuguese honey bread"?  

I did find mention of a cake called "bolo de mel," which means "honey cake." Bolo de mel includes molasses, which the "honey bread" recipes (including the one we made) do, but the photographs I've found (except maybe the one which appears with this post) look softer than the honey bread Mom and I made, even though they're all the right shade of brown.  Besides, if bolo de mel is the forerunner or inspiration for the "Portuguese honey bread" recipes I've found, why don't any of those recipes contain Madiera wine, since the recipes contain alcohol, and bolo de mel is a Madeiran recipe?  On the other hand, bolo de mel includes star anise, and the recipe my mother and I used contains anise--providing a similar taste.

Eater.com has some interesting things to say about bolo de mel (scroll down for the quoted language).  Unfortunately, I do not know the source/s for the facts it asserts.  But as described on the Eater.com site, it certainly resembles what my mother and I made, and it's associated strongly with Madeira Island, source of the wine of the same name.  The Eater.com article claims that bolo de mel is really called bolo de mel da Madeira:

"With its many sugarcane plantations, Madeira Island became an important depot for sugar production for all of Portugal’s colonies. This dark, spicy cake is made with honey from sugarcane, nuts, cloves, star anise, and cinnamon, and has a strong flavor of molasses. The cake is considered to be Madeira’s oldest dessert, dating back 600 years. Madeira Islanders usually prepare it on December 8, the day of the Immaculate Conception, but it can be found year-round on the island as well as in Lisbon. Note: In accordance with local tradition, the cake should be cut with your hand, not with a knife."

Perhaps the "Portuguese Honey Bread" we made is bolo de mel .  Currently I have no confirmed solution to the mystery.  If any of my readers do, or if they at least have any interesting ideas or similar recipes, hopefully they will comment on this post.

EDIT: (3/14/2021)  I just remembered, or think I remembered, something that strengthens the case for our "Portuguese Honey Bread" being bolo de mel.  I believe the issue of Good Housekeeping where Mom found the recipe we made was in a Christmas issue.  That harmonizes with Eater.com's statement that bolo de mel is usually made in December for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.  If I find any further information that relates to this topic, I'll probably write another post.

2D EDIT:  (3/14/2021)  I re-read my original post on "Portuguese Honey Bread" from 2010, and in it I said that Mom and I found the recipe "late one fall in the special Christmas edition of one of the "women's" magazines--I think it was Good Housekeeping, but I'm not sure."  So it did appear in association with Christmas!  I have also found some web references relating to bolo de mel that I will discuss in a future post.

Featured Recipe--Portuguese Honey Bread

One of the things I've decided to do with this blog is share unusual recipes, or at least my favorite recipes, from time to time. This recipe is not original, but it is both a personal favorite and unusual. It is a recipe for Portuguese Honey Bread. My mother and I discovered it late one fall in the special Christmas edition of one of the "women's" magazines--I think it was Good Housekeeping, but I'm not sure. I no longer have the magazine, but Mom and I transcribed it later to contribute to a small, amateur booklet of recipes for our church, and that collection I still have, and would like to share.

Despite the fact that the bread is wonderful, we only made this recipe once. You'll understand why after you read it. Here is my paraphrase of it.

* * * *

2 1/3 cups butter
1 1/2 cups light molasses
2/3 cup honey
2 3/4 cups granulated sugar
1/3 cup cold mashed potatoes
1/2 cup sherry
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
1 tablespoon anise seed
1/4 cup cinnamon (yes, 1/4 cup)*
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon Royal baking powder
11 cups sifted all-purpose flour

Preheat your oven to 325 F.

In a large bowl, beat together at medium speed (with an electric mixer) the butter, molasses, honey, and sugar until fluffy. Add the mashed potatoes, sherry, cloves, anise seed, cinnamon, pepper, baking soda, and baking powder. Mix well. At low speed, beat in about half of the flour. At that point, the mixture will be too heavy to use an electric mixer; beat in the rest of the flour with a wooden spoon until all of the flour is just mixed in.

Transfer the batter to three (3) greased, decorated 2-quart cake molds or three (3) nine-inch cake pans. Place the pans in the oven so that none of the pans is directly above another pan. Bake 1 1/2 hours or until the bread comes away from the sides of the pan.

Cool the bread in the molds or pans on racks for 10 minutes before removing it from the pans. Let the bread cool completely to room temperature, then wrap it tightly in foil and let it "season," wrapped, for several days before serving.

* * * *

Take very seriously the advice about using a wooden spoon to beat in the second half of the flour if you do not want to damage the mixer. Mom and I were having trouble keeping the mixer in motion before the first four cups of flour were mixed in; by the time all 11 cups were in the bowl, the mixture was so stiff and heavy we could barely budge the wooden spoon. Despite that fact, the bread smelled so good while baking that, after we took it out of the oven, we attempted to pry a sliver loose from one of the loaves to taste it. At length, after nearly breaking a knife on the *extremely* hard loaf, we got a few slivers (and a lot of wisecracks from my father); it tasted of honey and cinnamon, but was dry and hard. So we wrapped it back up and let it sit for a week.

After about a week, the bread was not only cuttable and chewable, but it was moister, and wonderfully rich. It tasted a lot like gingerbread, if gingerbread were more like cake.

I have found two variants of this recipe on the Internet. This one uses only 4 1/2 cups of flour. It also contains ingredients that do not appear in the recipe I knew, such as candied fruit, port, and eggs. The other major variant, which you can see here, is more like the recipe I had, but it substitutes instant potato flakes for the mashed potatoes, includes candied fruit, and uses about 6 cups of flour. I would bet that neither of these recipes would be as hard to stir as the recipe my mom and I made, since all of them contain about as much liquid as the recipe above but much less flour.


* The parenthetical remark appeared in the original recipe.