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Bread Raised Twice
Measure out four quarts of sifted flour, take out a pint in a cup, and place remainder in a bread-pan. Make a well in the middle, into which turn one table-spoon sugar, one of salt, and one cup of yeast; then mix in one pint of milk which has been made bloodwarm by adding one pint of boiling water; beat well with a strong spoon, add one table-spoon lard, knead for twenty to thirty minutes, and let rise over night; in the morning knead again, make into loaves, let them rise one hour, and bake fifty minutes. Water may be used instead of the pint of milk, in which case use twice as much lard.
A plain white household loaf scaled for a family: four quarts of flour makes roughly three large loaves. The instructions assume a homemade liquid yeast and a cool kitchen, which are the two things a modern baker has to translate.
- The flour, in weightFour quarts of sifted flour is about 16 cups, roughly 4 to 4 1/2 lb. The recipe does not say what the pint held back in a cup is for; it was presumably kept as a working reserve for the board and for adjusting a slack dough, so do not add it at the start.
- "One cup of yeast"This means a cup of homemade liquid or potato yeast, not the dry granules sold now. For this quantity of flour, about 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of instant or active dry yeast is the equivalent leavening; the missing cup of liquid can be made up with water.
- BloodwarmBody temperature, about 98F. A pint of milk plus a pint of boiling water actually lands well above that, somewhere around 125 to 140F depending on how cold the milk starts, so let the mixture cool and check it rather than trusting the arithmetic. Anything above roughly 130F kills the yeast.
- Kneading timeTwenty to thirty minutes reflects hand kneading of a stiff dough with no bench rest. With modern flour, 10 to 12 minutes by hand or 6 to 8 in a stand mixer on low will bring the same windowpane.
- The overnight riseThis assumes an unheated kitchen and a slow homemade yeast. With commercial yeast in a 70F room the dough will be over-risen and sour by morning. Either use the overnight rise in the refrigerator, or cut the yeast to about a teaspoon and leave it in the coolest spot you have.
- Oven heatNone is given, since the writer assumed a wood range judged by hand. Bake at 375F. Fifty minutes suits large loaves; the internal temperature should read 195 to 205F and the bottom should sound hollow.
- FatOne tablespoon lard for four quarts of flour is a very lean dough. Butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly. The instruction to double the lard when water replaces the milk compensates for the milk fat and gives a softer crumb.
- YieldAbout three 9x5 inch loaves, or four smaller ones. The dough is best halved if your bowl and oven are ordinary domestic size.
Recipes titled "bread raised twice" or "raised three times" belong to a period when the number of risings was one of the few variables a housewife could control, since neither yeast strength nor oven heat could be measured. If the source is Buckeye Cookery, that book was published in Minneapolis in 1877 and grew out of an earlier Ohio compilation gathered from the contributions of many women; it devotes an unusually long section to bread, prefaced by remarks on bread as the measure of a cook. The cup of yeast called for here would have been kept alive at home, often a potato or hop yeast refreshed every few days, which may be why the dough is set to work overnight rather than in an hour: such yeasts were slow and variable, and the long cool rise was insurance as much as flavour. Compressed cake yeast was becoming available in American cities in exactly these decades, and within a generation recipes of this kind were rewritten around it.