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Gems, Fritters, etc
The pans for what are called gems, should always be hot, and be well buttered before the gems are put in. Bake quickly. In making fritters, use haste, but beat the batter thoroughly, and cook at once. Pancakes should also be well beaten, and if eggs are used, these should be beaten separately, and added the last thing. [17] 1 Sponge. To make sponge, sift the flour, and in the middle of it pour the yeast, mix thoroughly, adding lukewarm water, from time to time, as needed, so the whole will be like thick batter. Pour this slowly on flour. If made at night, work the first thing in the morning, using flour enough to make the dough of the proper consistency. Some persons mould once and bake, and others work the dough the second time. When risen, put in the oven at once, and bake an hour for ordinary sized loaves. III. Yeast and Yeast-making.
Dried WITHIN the last few years, grocers in cities and principal towns keep compressed yeast, in its natural and moist state. This is made from the superfluous yeast of breweries and distilleries, and also, by brewing, directly, as an article of commerce. yeast or yeast-cakes are also universally sold. They are not always good. The working principle of all yeast is a plant-a microscopic fungus-and to the ordinary observer, yeast is simply a thick, creamy froth, which causes bread to rise, and beer and other liquids to ferment. If the fermentation goes too far, the bread or liquid becomes sour. The next stage is mold. The purer the yeast, the less liable are substances to run into acid fermentation and mold. The recipes which we give will fully provide for all that is necessary for household purposes.
Hop Yeast and Yeast-Cakes. To a handful of good hops, add a quart of water; boil until reduced one-half; strain, wipe out the vessel, return the liquid, and set over the fire again. While the hops are boiling, mix enough flour with a little cold water to make it as thick as stiff starch. When it begins to boil after returning it to the vessel, stir in the dissolved flour. Let it boil a few minutes, then set it to cool. When cool enough stir in some good yeast or a dissolved yeast-cake, and a tablespoonful or a little more of sugar. Pour into a jug, cork, and let it work. It is best to set it in something suitable, in case it should work and run over before you are aware, and you lose a good deal. After it works, cork tight, and keep in a cool place. To make the cakes, sift into a pan one-third of flour and two-thirds of meal, as fine as you can, that there may be as little meal as possible in your bread; pour in the yeast, and work well into a stiff 'dough. Make off into cakes the size of a small teacup, and about three-quarters of an inch thick; dry in the shade. From this start you may have perpetual yeast by taking off a piece of dough after it has risen for bread, and working it with your hands in water enough to make a thick batter, and then sifting in meal enough to make the cakes as before stated; or a piece of the risen dough will raise another batter of dough the same as the yeast.
Hop Yeast, No. 2.- One and one-half pounds of grated raw potato, one quart of boiling water in which a handful of hops have been boiled, one teacup of white sugar, one-half teacup of salt. When almost cold put a little good yeast to start it, say about half a pint. One pint of this yeast makes four good-sized loaves of excellent bread.
Three different things are packed into this page: a short paragraph of batter-cookery advice, a note on bread sponge, and a set of working recipes for homemade hop yeast. The yeast recipes are the substance here, and they assume a kitchen with no reliable packet of dried yeast in the cupboard.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan, usually with oval or round cups. Heating it in the oven and buttering it just before the batter goes in gives the crust the book is after; a modern cast-iron popover or muffin pan does the same job, while thin nonstick tins do not.
- "Bake quickly"Quick means a hot oven; the book gives no figure, but a hot setting is what is implied. Gem batters rely on that initial blast to set the outside before the inside finishes.
- Meal means cornmealIn the yeast-cake instructions, "one-third flour and two-thirds meal" most likely means wheat flour and cornmeal, the usual sense of "meal" in American cookbooks of the period. The recipe wants it sifted as fine as possible so that as little of it as possible carries into the bread.
- A handful of hops is genuinely vagueThere is no way to convert this honestly. Dried hop cones vary enormously in density, and hop bitterness has changed with modern cultivars. Treat the hops as an antibacterial and flavouring agent rather than a measured ingredient.
- The corked jugSealing an actively fermenting liquid in a corked jug builds pressure. The original hedges this by telling you to stand it in something and to cork tight only after the vigorous working has finished. A loosely covered vessel, or one with an airlock, avoids the problem entirely.
- What the yeast actually isThis is a wild or backslopped culture, not a pure strain. It will contain lactic bacteria alongside the yeast, so bread raised with it is slower and tangier than bread from a commercial packet. The book's own warning about acid fermentation and mould is the reason for the cool storage and the frequent renewal.
- Strength and substitutionThe second recipe gives the only usable ratio on the page: one pint of liquid yeast raises four ordinary loaves, so roughly half a cup per loaf. Expect rising times measured in hours rather than the 60–90 minutes a modern instant yeast dough takes.
- Sponge timingThe overnight sponge is a batter of flour, yeast and lukewarm water left to work, then built into a dough in the morning. Bake at once when risen; the book gives an hour for an ordinary loaf but no temperature, and an internal temperature near 200F is a surer test than time.
- Drying the cakesThe cakes are dried in the shade rather than in sun or oven heat, presumably because heat would kill the culture. Dried yeast loses vigour over time, which may be behind the book's remark that purchased yeast-cakes "are not always good."
Before reliable commercial yeast, keeping a household in bread meant keeping a culture alive, and hop yeast was a widely used American method for doing it: hops boiled into a bitter liquor that discouraged spoilage bacteria, thickened with a cooked flour or grated potato paste to feed the yeast, then started from a spoonful of the last batch. The dried yeast-cake was simply that culture carried in a portable, storable form, and the "perpetual yeast" instruction here — tear off a piece of risen dough and work it up again — is the same backslopping principle that keeps a sourdough starter going. The passage on compressed yeast marks the moment this book was written from: brewers' surplus yeast, pressed into moist cakes and sold through grocers, is generally traced to the late 1860s and spread rapidly through cities and larger towns in the decades after. A cookbook of this kind could assume its urban readers had access to it, while still needing to tell rural households how to make their own.