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Salt Hop Yeast
Put a gallon of cold water on the fire; let it come to a boil, and then put into it eight good potatoes and boil until well done, when they must be mashed fine, together with one teacupful of salt and one of white sugar. Directly after taking out the potatoes, put a handful of hops into the water, and let it boil while you are preparing the potatoes. Mix these with the hop-water, which must be boiling hot when added, and unstrained. When nearly cold, add one cup of lively yeast, stir well and set aside to rise in a warm place for twenty-four hours. Then strain, bottle and cork it up tightly. Strain through a sieve so that as much potato as possible may pass through. Allow half a teacup of this yeast to a quart of good flour in cold weather; in the summer a less quantity is required. Keep the bread warm while rising.
This is not a bread recipe but a homemade liquid yeast — a bottled starter kept on hand for baking, from the era before packaged yeast was reliable. The whole thing hinges on the potato-and-hop mash being fed with an active culture and then held genuinely warm.
- A teacupfulNineteenth-century teacups vary, and are generally reckoned somewhere between half a cup and a cup; the measure is genuinely imprecise. A teacup of salt to a gallon is deliberate — the salt is there to preserve the brew, as the name suggests, while the sugar feeds the yeast.
- The hopsA handful of whole dried hop flowers, perhaps 1/2 to 1 oz. Whole hops from a brewing shop suit this better than pellets, which disintegrate rather than staying strainable. Hops contribute bitterness and, more to the point, antibacterial resins that hold spoilage organisms back while the yeast works.
- "One cup of lively yeast"This means a cup of an existing, actively bubbling batch of the same liquid yeast, borrowed from a neighbour or saved from the last making. Without a live culture to start it, the mixture does not reliably ferment — it is a propagation recipe, not a spontaneous one.
- Add hop water boiling hot, then waitThe boiling water is meant to scald the potato and kill competing organisms. Do not add the starter until the mash is below about 100F; hotter than that and you kill the yeast you are trying to multiply.
- A warm placeTwenty-four hours at roughly 75-85F. In a modern house, an oven with only the light on, or the top of the refrigerator, approximates the warm kitchen corner the author assumed.
- Corking tightlyAn active starter continues producing carbon dioxide in the bottle and can build enough pressure to burst glass. Refrigerate once bottled and use a loose cap or a fermentation-safe vessel rather than a driven cork.
- Keeping itExpect a week or two under refrigeration before it turns sour and sluggish. Shake before measuring — the suspended potato settles hard.
- Yield and useAbout a gallon, which is a great deal by modern standards; a quarter batch is more practical. Half a teacup to a quart of flour is roughly 1/3 cup liquid yeast per pound of flour, and doughs raised this way take several hours, not one.
Hop yeast belongs to the long stretch of American housekeeping before reliable commercial yeast, when a baker's leaven was a perishable household possession that had to be renewed every week or two and was often shared between neighbours. Potato supplied starch and nutrients for the yeast, sugar a quick feed, and hops their preservative bitterness — the same resins that keep beer from souring — while the heavy dose of salt slowed spoilage in a bottle kept in a cellar rather than a refrigerator. Compressed cake yeast, generally traced in the United States to the Fleischmann brothers' work in the 1870s, and the dried granular yeasts that followed made recipes like this obsolete, but domestic cookbooks went on printing them for decades because rural households could not always buy yeast fresh. Its survival in a book called 20th Century Home Cookbook is a small measure of how recently the kitchen still made its own leaven.