Talk:Quick bread

Shortening slush method

There is another method, which this article does not mention. I don't know the proper name for it, and have never seen it explained as a "method" but I've seen it in old recipes so it isn't something new. It basically involves mixing melted shortening into cold water (or milk, etc). The shortening hardens up with contact with the water, but not as a single lump. I turns into a sort of slurry distributed throughout the water...rather like slush. The result when you mix it into the dry ingredients is somewhat like having cut butter or shortening into the dough with a fork or pastry cutter, but much easier.--Ericjs (talk) 15:34, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Actually I'll retract my theorizing about this method. I've tried the recipe where I came across this method with vegetable oil instead of shortening, and did not end up with the "slush". The bread came out not much different than with the shortening slush method. From this I conclude that the only thing giving it its rise is the chemical leaving, in this case baking soda alone, and no egg at all.

However, this also leaves me to feel that the article is over-stating things in claiming 3 method of quick bread, each of which uses some trick to supplement the rise from the chemical leaving. Because this quick break (and I imagine others) does not use any of these methods and rises none-the-less. --Ericjs (talk) 03:54, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Quick bread/CommentsTalk:Quick bread/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Needs a lot of work, not enough done. -- Warfreak 05:39, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Last edited at 05:39, 9 June 2007 (UTC). Substituted at 03:41, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

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"Place of origin: United States" Really??

The info box claims that quick breads originated in the US. Can anyone find a reference for that? Otherwise I would suggest that place of origin is removed. Quick breads have existed longer that the United States. Yes, modern baking powder was developed in the US in the middle of the 19th century, but potash/pearlash K
₂CO
₃) has been used since 1000 BC and hartshorn salt ((NH₄)₂CO₃) at least since the 16th century as forerunners to baking powder when making quick bread. Hartshorn salt is used still today in some Swedish baking. Thomas Blomberg (talk) 19:17, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

And not only in Sweden! In Norwegian and Danish baking (as well as many other places) too, the very similar Hjortetakksalt is used in many traditional bakings. I have put [citation needed] in the text where US invention is mentioned. I agree that it should be removed from the fact-box until it can be confirmed(or denied) ~🐈🐈~♪~何? 21:54, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

It doesn't say that quick breads originated in the US. It says that the term originated there. I'm Australian, and I've never heard anyone call scones, cakes, or any other chemically leavened baked good "quick bread". It's not a term that we use, so it may well be that the term was coined in America.

That said, the article has some weird statements, such as saying that the shortening method (combining a solid fat with flour "is said to produce "shortened" cakes and breads, regardless of whether or not the chosen fat is vegetable shortening." It's as though the author doesn't know that all fats, in baking with flour, are called "shortening", have been for centuries, and that vegetable shortening is a recent development and is called "vegetable shortening" because it has no other use. At least I try (talk) 13:31, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

Totally agree. Not used in the UK, and as per your comments is not used in Australia or New Zealand or South Africa. The irony is that it is sn article at all as it is extremely similar to Cake!Davidstewartharvey (talk) 17:39, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

• The original complaint was about the contents of the infobox, not the article text. The infobox was corrected last year.
• As @At least I try points out, the article only said that the US is where the name quick bread came from. It doesn't say where the idea came from.

I have re-written the text of Quick bread#History in an attempt to make it clearer. I've also removed a citation to Toni Morrison's Beloved (novel), as fiction is not generally considered a reliable source for etymology and synonyms.

If there is a name for "chemically leavened bread-like baked goods" as a category in your (all) home countries, please share it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:11, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing that up. I've used Wikipedia on a mobile phone exclusively for so long I had forgotten not just what an info box was, but that they existed at all.

To my knowledge, there is no general name, at least in common use outside the professional baking industry, for chemically leavened baked goods, bread-like or otherwise, in Australia. Those who bake such things, e.g. scones, cakes, muffins etc., simply know that self raising flour is used. Those who do not bake have no need to classify baked goods in that way.

Although some "special" recipes call for certain leavening agents to be added, in Australia, by far the most common chemical leavening agent is baking powder, which does not act until it is both wet and hot. It is most commonly already contained in the flour ("self raising flour"), though it can be easily bought and added to plain flour. It almost always contains sodium acid pyrophosphate as the acid; I know of no other type available here. At least I try (talk) 12:17, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

In the UK we also don't have a name for "quick breads". We just call them by their product names, i.e. Soda Bread, or if they are of the sweet variety like Scone, we use cake. I think the lead should clearly say this is a US term.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 13:09, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

People in the UK use the quick bread term: Therefore, we shouldn't say that this is just a US term. It appears to be the only term for the category that gets used in any English-speaking country. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:46, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

My wife is a chef and baker and they dont use the phrase at all. Although you have provided examples, it is not a common usage. In fact The Telegraph article article says quick breads on Great British Bake Off, but the phase isnt used on the website or the books? For example Soda Bread , or The Great British Bake Off: A Bake for All Seasons

The Official 2021 Great British Bake Off Book isbn:9780751584417. Even Paul Hollywood's Bread ISBN:9781408841228 doesn't mention quick bread. Like many American phrases, they appear in British culture because we watch a lot of American programmes. A Perfect example is here on another site where a user has complained about it using the American term Co-workers instead of the British phrase Colleagues.. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 09:22, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

Since this is an encyclopedia, instead of an etymological dictionary, it's not actually our job to carefully label the origin of each word. The job of an encyclopedia is to talk about what things are, not what words are.

If there were a different word in British English (or any other national variety of English), we would want to include that. Since there apparently is no other word used anywhere for this category of bread, then there really is nothing to say.

To be concrete and specific, the goal is:

• "Quick bread is a category that includes..."

and the goal is not:

• "Quick bread is the American name for a category that includes... British English doesn't have a word for this category, so if you're using British English, you'll either have to use the American term (aka 'the only term used in the entire English-speaking world for this particular category of food') or just not talk about it at all."

If you are particularly interested in differentiating between American and British English terms, then you might be interested in joining discussions at the wikt:Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium, where that is obviously relevant. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:45, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

But as per our Australian user its not a phrase used there. We should say Quick bread is the American name for a category that includes.... It does not need to say that British or Australian english doesn't use the phrase commonly. And the Quick bread article links to Scones, which as per the article in The Guardian you linked to by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall "Thank goodness, then, for quick breads and their spin-offs such as scones and drop scones" shows that it's not the same common meaning. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 18:57, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

No, we shouldn't. This is the only name used by anyone, speaking any English variant, anywhere in the world.

This isn't "the American name for a category". This is "the only name for this category". The fact that people outside the US don't talk much about this category doesn't change the fact that this is the only name for the category.

If we write "the American name for...", then people will wonder: "What's the British English name for this? What's the Indian English name for this? What's the Austrialian name for this?" There is no other name for this. This is "the" name, not "the American name". WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:40, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

The article continues to have a ridiculously US-centric perspective. The tone strongly suggests that this style of baking is restricted to the US or North America, whereas in fact only the terminology is regional. Baking without yeast happens pretty much universally, as the soda bread article correctly documents. --Ef80 (talk) 18:20, 4 July 2026 (UTC)

But the term quick bread isn't used universally. It is a North American centric term. Australians, NZ, South Africans and Brits do not use the term - we just Bread to describe any bread, yeast, sough sough or soda. There is no word in French, German or Swedish for quick bread. For example use Brot for yeast leavened bread and kuchen for anything made with baking powder. So that the article is written with US bias is not an issue - as long as the individual articles for the type of baked goods are written with a World perspective. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 07:01, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

David, I'm sure we've talked about this before. The article is not about the term. The article is about the kind of bread. It's very bad to take a subject that has different terminology and say "An elevator is a machine that vertically transports people or freight between levels in the United States and Canada" – as if outside of North America, these don't exist, because "a lift" is some completely separate subject. Wikipedia is not a dictionary. We write articles about the things, and not about the terms. Therefore, since this is a kind of bread that exists all over the world, it doesn't matter if "the term quick bread isn't used universally". This article is about the thing, and since the US is the only place to have a specific term for the thing, then we use the US term.

I think the problem in the article is not the term, but the fact that the history section describes only US history. The US history is significant, but it is only one part of the story. There are non-soda quick breads in use all over the world and throughout history, but this article is missing quite a lot of that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:28, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

In your example Elevator is a perfect example. In wikipedia we state in the lead "An elevator (North American English, Philippine English) or lift (Commonwealth English except Canada) is a machine that vertically transports people or freight between levels." So how is quick bread different? Quick bread is a North American centric term and concept that these are grouped together, that is used very rarely outside of that continent. A perfect example is Scone, which are not categories as quick breads in Australia and New Zealand by their Food Standards agency, but as their own product of Scone and rock cakes. The Germans dont have a word for it, or a concept. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 17:58, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

Basically, Quick breads is a word used by North Americans to create a concept for breads made without yeast, which is not adopted worldwide. In fact the first soda bread recipe was published in the Irish newspaper The Newry Telegraph in 1836 (and probably existed long before that), but the term quick bread wasn't coined until 1882, when it appeared in Marble Rock (Iowa) Weekly. As Encyclopedias should be accurate we should let readers know that. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 18:14, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

I can see that differentiating British vs US food terminology is a consistent them, but the terminology is basically irrelevant.

Wikipedia's goal is an orderly tree of articles that runs approximately like this:

• Bread
  • Breads by leavening agent
    1. Breads leavened with yeast
       • National Loaf
       • Staffordshire oatcake
       • Stottie cake
    2. Breads leavened with chemical leaveners (← the subject of this article)
       • Bannock (modern)
       • Soda bread
       • Scones
    3. Breads leavened with air
       • Yorkshire pudding
       • Choux pastry
    4. Unleavened bread
       • Bannock (historical)
       • Tattie scone
       • Hoggan
  • Breads by shape
    1. Flatbreads
    2. (etc.)
  • Breads by type of grain
    1. Barley bread
    2. (etc.)
  • (etc.)

This is the article for breads made with chemical leaveners. Bakers all over the world – not just the US – recognized chemical leavening as a group of breads that is different from breads made with yeast, and from unleavened bread, and from other forms of leavening. Each type of bread could fall into multiple categories (e.g., Roti is an unleavened bread, a flatbread, a wheat bread, etc.).

If it helps you worry less about the US "terminology", then you can pretend that this article is titled Chemically leavened bread instead of Quick bread. Any bread that is chemically leavened, from any culture, any country, and any time period, belongs in this article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:02, 6 July 2026 (UTC)

The classification you are using is again American - Germans use Brot for bread - unleavened breads like flatbreads are called ungesäuertes Brot, Scandinavian crispbreads are called Knäckebrot. Sweet "quick breads" come under Kuchen (cake) while soda bread comes under soda-brot. Yeast and dough doughs are normally just called brot. In Britain, colloquially we call sweet quick breads normally loaf or cake, and savoury Bread. Paul Hollywood's 100 Great Breads doesn't actually break down the breads into categories and they include both yeast, soughdough and chemically leavened. And Alan Davidson's seminal The Oxford Companion to Food doesnt break bread down into categories, and has no mention of quick bread. The French dont even believe quick bread is "pain" - Décret Pain of 1993 states it has to be made with yeast or soughdough. Savoury quickbreads are called Cake salé, sweet normally Gateau de voyage. And as I pointed out above Scones have their own classification down under. All quick breads needs is the lead to state its a North American term - it informs readers the correct information. Im not saying it should be called anything else. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 16:10, 6 July 2026 (UTC)

No, you're doing it backwards. Step one is to figure out what the subject of the article is. The subject of this article is chemically leavened breads. Having figured out what the subject of the article is, we pick a name. We picked quick breads, but the name we picked is not the important part. The important part is that we picked the subject to be chemically leavened breads. That means this includes the German Brot mit Backpulver as well as Soda-Brot (but not ungesäuertes Brot or most Swedish Knäckebrot).

We don't care whether some other sources don't break breads down into categories. Other sources do, and Wikipedia does. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:32, 7 July 2026 (UTC)

As pointed out chemically leavened breads cannot be called bread in France by law. Its not a category there. Where is it a category? North America. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 06:20, 7 July 2026 (UTC)

It doesn't matter whether French law uses the word bread. This is not the French Legal Wikipedia; it is the English Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia is based on Wikipedia:Reliable sources, and many reliable sources use this category. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:13, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

And the majority of the sources are American - some being dubious to say the least. The only two that are not are two English Dictionary's who state that its a North American term. And as pointed out, the rest of the world do not use the term or the grouping. Which is why I put that into the lead - it informs readers straight away, instead of burying at the bottom, which is where you moved it to. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 06:58, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

The rest of the English-speaking world sometimes uses the term.

Even the French use the grouping; as you pointed out, they recognize this group under the name "Cake salé".

It doesn't matter whether the sources are "American". It matters whether they are reliable. Consider this one:

"However, baker's antipathy for the new type of bread-making was also evident in Britain and America. Graham was mobbed by bakers several times, while British bakers often advertised their wares with slogans such as 'the bread with the gin in it', in a swipe to the non-yeast leavened competition heavily promoted by the temperance movement. However, in England and America baking powder was also marketed directly to the housewife as a separate and novel cooking aid or included in the new self-raising flour. Providing housewives with the ability to produce bread without the time, effort and unpredictability involved in yeast fermentation helped them devise an alternative product, known as quick-bread. Domestically and commercially, soda or quick-breads became particularly popular in areas and situations where yeast was more difficult to obtain or use, such as the southern states of America where the climate and cereal crops were less amenable to yeast use; in Ireland where the 'tradition' of Irish soda bread developed after the potato famine of 1848; and in Australia where 'damper' bread became standard fare due to the difficulty of using yeast during long sea journeys and in the outback. In addition, baking powder encouraged the baking and consumption of non-bread bakery products such as cakes and biscuits both domestically and commercially.[53] While fermentation remained the standard method of bread-making, the invention of baking powder helped create new products and alternative technological solutions to fermentation." (from: Cobbold, Carolyn Ann. 2018. “The Rise of Alternative Bread Leavening Technologies in the Nineteenth Century.” Annals of Science 75 (1): 21–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2017.1400100)

The author of that piece is on the Faculty of History at Cambridge University. Note that four English-speaking places outside of North America are mentioned here as making "quick-bread". WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:51, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

The quote does not state that it was a phrase in England - it says it a process in America and England to develop a fermentation process without yeast known as quick-bread. Chemical leavening and other baker's yeast substitutes: overview of patents filed between 1833 and 2019 Pierre Gélinas doi.org/10.1111/ijfs.15348: British Inventions: Notes that British inventors were particularly active before 1920, with about one-third of their inventions targeting the aerated bread process, which provides an alternative quick method to yeasted bread and relates to the concept of quick bread. A concept - not stating used as a grouping. In fact Google scholar only has 11 uses of Quick bread in British English articles. If you do a similar search asking for the use in American English and you get considerably more.

Baking in America: Traditional and Contemporary Favorites from the Past 200 Years By Greg Patent ISBN 0618043816

Explains that "quick breads" are an American baking category often contrasted with yeast breads, which rely on chemical leaveners like baking powder or baking soda rather than yeast. Use in American Recipes: Includes quick breads as a category alongside yeast breads, cakes, cookies, and pies as part of a collection of traditional and contemporary favorites in American baking. An American baking category. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 05:49, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

It doesn't matter whether The quote does not state that it was a phrase in England, because this Wikipedia article is about the 'thing' (the 'concept', the 'category', the 'type') and not about the phrase. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:21, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

First citation's link is dead

Basically the subject. I don't know really what it originally went to but a replacement needs to be found. --Nerd1a4i (talk) 01:32, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, @Nerd1a4i. I've added a link to a working archived copy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:16, 24 June 2025 (UTC)