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Another Salt-Rising Bread
In summer take at night one (scant) pint of new milk, half as much hot water, a tea-spoon salt, one of sugar, and a very little soda. Mix all in a nice, sweet pitcher (it must be perfectly clean and sweet), stir in one table-spoon of corn meal, and add flour enough to make a medium batter; stir well, place the pitcher in an iron kettle with quite warm water, using so much water that the pitcher will barely rest on the bottom of the kettle; cover closely and leave all night (on the stove if the fire is nearly out) where it will be kept warm, not hot, for an hour or two. If the pitcher is not too large, it will probably be full in the morning; if not, add a spoon of flour, stir well, warm the water in the kettle, replace the pitcher, cover, and keep it warm until light. Have ready two quarts of sifted flour in a pan, make a hole in the center, put in an even tea-spoon of salt, a tea-cup of nearly boiling water; add one pint of new milk, and stir a batter there in the center of the flour, add the "emptyings" from the pitcher, and stir well (there will be a good deal of flour all round the batter; this is right); cover with another pan, keep warm until light-it will rise in an hour or even less-when it is ready to be well kneaded, and made directly into loaves, which place in the baking-pans, keep well covered and warm until light, when it is ready to bake. The secret of success is to keep it warm but not at all hot. This bread is good if no milk is used; indeed, some prefer it made with water alone instead of milk and water. In cold weather, if kitchen is cold at night, do not set "emptyings" over night, but make early in the morning. - Havillah, Farina, Ill.
Salt-rising bread is leavened not by yeast but by warmth-loving bacteria captured in a cornmeal-and-milk ferment. The whole method hinges on holding one narrow temperature for many hours, which is the part most modern kitchens get wrong.
- The hinge: 100–115°F, steady"Warm, not at all hot" means roughly 100–115°F held overnight. Above about 120°F the culture dies and nothing rises; below about 90°F lactic acid bacteria take over and you get sourness without lift. A turned-off oven with the light on, a proofing box, or a cooler with jars of warm water works better than the pitcher-in-a-kettle rig, which needs the water re-warmed every couple of hours.
- "Emptyings"An old word for leaven or starter — originally the dregs emptied from a beer or cider barrel. Here it simply means the risen, foamy ferment from the pitcher, all of which goes into the dough.
- MeasuresA scant pint of milk is just under 2 cups; half as much hot water is therefore just under 1 cup. Two quarts of sifted flour is roughly 8 cups, or about 2 lb — expect to adjust, since sifted flour measured by volume varies a great deal. A tea-cup is about ¾ cup.
- "A very little soda"Read this as a pinch, no more than ⅛ teaspoon. It takes the edge off the acidity of the ferment; do not be tempted to add more.
- New milk and cornmeal"New milk" is fresh whole milk straight from the cow. Whole pasteurized milk works; ultra-pasteurized is the one to avoid. For the cornmeal, a stone-ground meal that has not been degerminated ferments far more reliably than the fine degerminated supermarket kind, since the culture rides in on the grain.
- The smell is correctA working salt-rising ferment smells strongly of cheese, or of feet, well before it smells of bread. That pungency is the signature of the method, not spoilage, and it bakes out into the distinctive sweet, close-grained loaf. What you do not want is a ferment that has gone slimy or shows mold — start again.
- Timing and patienceSalt-rising dough is slow. The sponge stage may run 10–14 hours, the batter in the flour an hour or two, and the shaped loaves 2–4 hours rather than the usual one. Keep the loaves in the same warm spot; a cold rise will not recover.
- Baking and yieldThe original assumes you know your own oven. Two quarts of flour gives two standard loaves; bake at 375°F for 40–50 minutes, until the interior reaches about 200°F. The crumb is dense and fine-textured by nature — it will not be airy like a yeast loaf.
- If it failsIt often does on the first try, and the usual cause is temperature drift. Note that the recipe itself offers a fallback: it says the bread is good with no milk at all, and that some prefer it made with water alone instead of milk and water.
Salt-rising bread belongs to the Appalachians and the Ohio Valley, where it spread in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries among households that had no dependable supply of brewer's yeast — its appearance in an 1877 Ohio compilation like Buckeye Cookery, alongside several competing versions, shows how ordinary it still was on the Midwestern table. The name is usually explained by the practice of bedding the crock of ferment in a box of warm salt overnight to hold the heat, though that is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one. What no nineteenth-century cook could have known is what was actually doing the work: the rise comes from heat-loving bacteria of the Clostridium group carried on the cornmeal, which is why the ferment demands blood-warm temperatures and produces that famously cheesy aroma. The technique nearly vanished with the arrival of reliable commercial yeast, and survives now mostly through a handful of regional bakeries and stubborn home bakers.