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Excellent Bread
Three medium sized potatoes boiled and mashed, rub them through the cullender with the water they are boiled in. Two thirds tea-cup home made yeast, or two good yeast cakes, make about one quart altogether, add enough flour to make a stiff sponge, in the morning add a tablespoon melted lard, a little salt and knead it out adding more flour. Use the patent flour.
A potato sponge bread of the kind set at night and baked the next morning. The recipe assumes you already know how to shape and bake a loaf, so the gaps worth filling are the yeast, the flour and the oven.
- The hinge: keep the potato waterRubbing the potatoes through the colander with the water they are boiled in is the whole point. The starch in that water feeds the yeast and keeps the crumb moist and slow to stale; draining it away gives an ordinary, drier loaf.
- CullenderA colander. A food mill or a coarse sieve does the job better; the aim is a smooth thin potato puree with no lumps to tear the dough.
- Yeast quantities"Two good yeast cakes" most likely means commercial compressed yeast, though dried yeast cakes were also in use at this date. If compressed, that is roughly 1 to 1.5 oz, equivalent to somewhere around 3 teaspoons of instant dried yeast. The two-thirds tea-cup of home-made yeast is not equivalent in strength — a nineteenth-century hop or potato yeast was a weak liquid barm, which is why so much of it was needed.
- Tea-cupA tea-cup in books of this period is usually reckoned at about 6 fl oz, less than a modern measuring cup, though the term was used loosely and some writers meant a full half-pint. Since the whole is to come to about a quart, the exact figure matters little here.
- Make about one quart altogetherPotato, potato water and yeast together should come to 4 cups of liquid; top up with warm water. That much liquid with bread flour makes two generous loaves.
- Patent flourRoller-milled white flour from the heart of the wheat berry, the premium grade of the 1880s and 90s. Modern bread flour is the closest match; all-purpose works but gives a softer, lower loaf.
- Stiff sponge overnightBeat in enough flour for a thick batter-to-soft-dough consistency, cover, and leave at cool room temperature overnight. In a warm kitchen it will overproof and sour; 65–68F is about right.
- Salt and lard"A little salt" is around 2 teaspoons for this quantity of flour. The tablespoon of melted lard is a tenderiser and keeper — butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly.
- BakingNo oven is given. Loaves of this size bake at 375–400F for 35–45 minutes, to an internal 200–205F.
Potato bread of this sort was a standing feature of American home baking through the nineteenth century, when yeast was unreliable and cooks looked for anything that would help a sponge along; boiled potato and its starchy water gave the leaven a head start and produced a loaf that stayed soft for days. The instruction to "use the patent flour" gives an earliest possible date rather than a close one, since the term stayed in use well into the twentieth century: patent flour was the new grade produced by the roller mills that took over American milling in the 1870s and 80s, prized for its whiteness and strength, and calling for it by name was a mark of an up-to-date kitchen. The alternative offered between home-made yeast and "two good yeast cakes" catches the same moment of transition, when commercially produced compressed yeast was becoming available but many households still kept a jar of their own barm going on the shelf.