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Vienna Bread
For six small loaves take three pints tepid water or sweet milk, three and one half quarts flour, one pint baker's yeast. Mix throughly, and set in a warm place. When light, which will be in about three hours, take one and one half ounces salt, dissolved in one pint water, two ounces butter, throughly mix it into the sponge, using flour enough to make the dough stiff to mould. Let it stand until risen. Mould into loaves, and bake in a mod erately warm oven.
A straightforward sponge-and-dough formula scaled for a large household: six loaves at once, with liquid yeast measured by the pint. The main work of translation is the yeast and the flour measure, both of which are given in nineteenth-century terms.
- Baker's yeast by the pintThis means liquid yeast or barm, a pourable ferment, not the dry granules sold today. There is no exact modern equivalent, since barm varied in strength; roughly a tablespoon of instant dry yeast will leaven this much flour, and if you substitute, add the missing pint back as water so the hydration holds.
- Flour by volumeThree and a half quarts of flour is about 14 cups, or roughly 4 lb. Weigh it if you can; scooped flour varies by 20 percent and this dough is meant to be stiff enough to mould by hand.
- SaltOne and a half ounces is about 2.5 tablespoons of fine salt. Against the roughly 4 lb of flour that is over 2 percent by weight, on the high side by modern standards, though the recipe also calls for extra flour to stiffen the dough, which brings the figure down.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature. "Moderately warm" suggests a brisk but not fierce oven; for a lean dough of this kind somewhere around 375-400F is a reasonable modern reading, hot enough to set the crust before the crumb dries out.
- The crust is the pointVienna bread was prized for a thin, crisp, glossy crust, which comes from steam in the first ten minutes. Throw a cup of water onto a preheated pan on the oven floor as the loaves go in, or bake under a cover for the first third of the time.
- Sponge timingThree hours is a guide for a warm kitchen with vigorous barm. Judge by the sponge itself: it should be domed, bubbled and just beginning to slacken at the centre before you add salt and butter.
- Why salt goes in secondKeeping salt out of the sponge lets the yeast work unchecked, one of the advantages of the two-stage method along with the flavour a long sponge builds. Dissolving it in water before adding keeps it from landing in patches that stall fermentation.
- Yield and scalingWith five pints of liquid and some 4 lb of flour plus the extra worked in to stiffen it, the batch runs to roughly 9 or 10 lb of dough, so the six "small loaves" are well over a pound each. The quantities halve and quarter cleanly if you do not want six loaves.
Vienna bread arrived in the English-speaking kitchen through the international exhibitions of the nineteenth century, where Austrian bakers showed off loaves made with pressed yeast and steam in the oven; the style is generally credited with introducing American and British bakers to compressed yeast in place of homemade barm and hop rising. What made it distinctive was less the formula, which is plainly a lean white dough enriched with a little butter, than the handling: a wet sponge for flavour, a stiff final dough for shape, and a steamy oven for the glassy crust. That this version still calls for a pint of baker's yeast, bought or brewed as a liquid, places it at the transitional moment when the Vienna method had reached the home cook but the new yeast had not.