Breads, or cakes in the shape of loaves, that can be easily used as breakfast or dessert are always great recipes to have on hand. They’re quick and easy to put together and are tasty enough to impress whoever you share them with.
Today’s featured recipe is a guava nut bread from a book called Our Golden Anniversary Favorite Recipes that was published by Maui Extension Homemakers’ Council around 1978. The cover of the book has a golden shimmer to it, adding to the celebration of 50 years of the University of Hawaiʻi’s Agricultural Extension Service (also called the Cooperative Extension) beginning work on Maui.
Four previous recipe books were published prior to this one. The first one published in 1957 had a yellow cover and was titled Our Favorite Recipes. Proceeds from the sale of these cookbooks were used to help finance several initiatives, like community service and education programs as well as leadership development.
A fun part of the book is a page that tells you how to scale up the amount of ingredients needed to cook for crowds. According to the book, you’ll need 1 pint of salad dressing for a group of 25, which equates to 2 quarts if you’re cooking for 100. For mashed potatoes, you’ll need 35 pounds of potatoes for 100 people.
There are a lot of recipes in the book with about 3 fitting on a page throughout the roughly 150 pages of recipes.
For the guava nut bread, the shortening in the recipe can be replaced with butter if you prefer and the soda mentioned in the ingredient list is baking soda. The recipe doesn’t specify a specific type of nut, so you can mix in whatever you have on hand. If you need a suggestion, I would recommend macadamia nuts or pecans. And of course, you can leave them out if someone has a nut allergy.
Foodie Friday is a segment in the Akamai Recap newsletter that's a place to talk story and connect over food. If you have a favorite recipe you’d like to share, feel free to send them via email to pclay@hawaiipublicradio.org
