I’m looking at a couple of recipes from the early twentieth century. One calls for a quick oven. The temperature for that (375 – 400°F) was easy enough to work out, several places online have it, including a 2010 Q&A from this site. The other one, quiet oven, is proving a little more challenging. (If this is a mistake, it was a typo/typesetting mistake in the original article: it is a newspaper article and is pretty clearly 'quiet'.) I am leaning toward ‘slow oven’, 300-325°F, because it is difficult to imagine anything being cooked at lower temperatures. (It is a sweet potato biscuit if that makes a difference to anyone’s logic process.)
So, any ideas what a ‘quiet oven’ might be?
Best Answer
Well, quiet and quick look similar to an OCR, especially one with a spell-checking dictionary looking at faded and/or poorly forged letterset.
If you have ever reacted buttermilk and baking soda, you know that it is a violent reaction, and one that is not endless. If you want your batter to rise and keep its form, you would use a hot preheated oven to capture the bubbles, a quick oven.
So I am pretty sure that a quiet oven is actually quick.
The only thing that it could possibly be if quiet is really what was meant and an accurate description of the oven, in my opinion, is a stage in the wood-firing of a bakers oven where there are only coals glowing and the oven isn’t making any sound. But that is an assumption that I have no reference for. (And this would probably be a very hot environment, ergo quiet = quick).
Thinking about this some more, linguistically speaking, a ‘quick oven’ might be a shortened form for ‘quick ovening’. This could come from a German baker who anglicized the German: e.g. schnellbacken which is implicitly only possible in a very hot environment, regardless of the oven type. It would also mean that you don’t have time to do errands or chores while the biscuit is in the oven.