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Bread Sponge and Bread
Five pints warm water, five quarts sifted flour, one coffee-cup yeast; mix in a two-gallon stone jar, cover closely, and set in a large tin pan, so that if the sponge rises over the top of the jar, the drippings may fall into the pan. Set to rise the evening before baking. In winter be careful to set in a warm place. In the morning sift six quarts flour into a pail, pour the sponge into a breadpan or bowl, add two table-spoons of salt, then the flour gradually; mix and knead well, using up nearly all the flour. This first kneading is the most important, and should occupy at least twenty minutes. Make the bread in one large loaf, set away in a warm place, and cover with a cloth. It ought to rise in half an hour, when it should be kneaded thoroughly again for ten minutes. Then take enough dough for three good-sized loaves (a quart bowl of dough to each), give five minutes kneading to each loaf, and place to rise in a dripping-pan well greased with lard. The loaves will be light in five or ten minutes, and will bake in a properly heated oven in half an hour. Make a well in the center of the remaining dough, and into it put a half tea-cup of white sugar, one tea-cup of lard, and two eggs, which mix thoroughly with the dough, knead into one large loaf, set in a warm place about fifteen minutes to rise, and, when light, knead five minutes and let rise again for about ten minutes, when it should be light. Take out of pan, and knead on bread-board, roll about an inch in thickness, cut out with a biscuit, cutter, and place in dripping-pan; let rise five minutes and bake twenty minutes. In winter more time must be allowed for rising.
This is a full household baking day scaled for a family and a wood range: about eleven quarts of flour, five loaves plus a pan of sweet biscuits. Everything about it can be reproduced at a quarter scale in a home kitchen, but several of the numbers need translating first.
- The hinge: the spongeThe overnight sponge does the real work. Five pints water to five quarts flour makes a slack, batter-like sponge that ferments loose and fast; it should be bubbling and domed by morning. If it has collapsed and smells sharply of alcohol, it has gone too far and the loaves will be sour and slack.
- A coffee-cup of yeastThis means about a cup of homemade liquid yeast — a hop or potato barm kept going in the pantry, roughly the strength of a wet sourdough starter. Modern equivalent for an overnight sponge of this size is around 1 teaspoon instant dry yeast; a cup of active sourdough starter behaves more like the original. The book's own yeast recipes appear elsewhere in this section.
- Total flourEleven quarts of sifted flour is roughly 11 to 12 pounds. Nineteenth-century soft winter wheat flour generally drank less water than modern bread flour, so "using up nearly all the flour" is the real instruction — go by feel and hold some back.
- Scaling downQuarter the recipe for two loaves: about 2 1/2 cups water, 5 cups flour and the yeast for the sponge; in the morning about 6 cups flour and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. Two tablespoons salt to eleven quarts flour is on the low side by current taste; nearer 2 percent of flour weight is standard now.
- The rising times are not typos, but ignore themFive to ten minutes for a loaf to become light assumes a very vigorous barm and a spot beside a hot range. In a 70F kitchen expect 45 to 90 minutes for the bulk rise and 30 to 45 minutes for shaped loaves. Judge by volume and a slow spring-back when pressed, never by the clock here.
- "A properly heated oven"The book gives no temperature. For bread in a wood range this would have been a hot oven on falling heat; 400 to 425F is a reasonable modern stand-in. Half an hour suits a loaf of about 1 1/2 pounds; internal temperature of 200 to 205F is the reliable test.
- A quart bowl of doughRoughly 1 1/2 to 2 pounds of dough per loaf, which is a standard 9x5 pan. The recipe bakes them in a greased dripping-pan, i.e. free-form and touching, which gives soft sides.
- The enriched remainderSugar, lard and eggs worked into the leftover dough turns it into what would now be called sweet biscuits or tea rolls. Cut an inch thick, they bake 20 minutes at the same heat. Butter or shortening replaces the lard directly; lard gives the flakier crumb.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was published at Marysville, Ohio, in 1877, and is usually said to have grown out of recipes contributed by local churchwomen; its bread chapter reflects a world in which flour came by the barrel and baking happened once or twice a week for a large household. The overnight sponge method it describes — a loose batter of flour, water and homemade barm set to work while the family slept — was a common American approach before commercial compressed yeast became widely available in the 1880s, and it has a descendant in the poolish and biga of modern bread books. The three long kneadings, and the insistence that the first is "the most important," are often explained by the soft winter wheat of the region, though the recipe itself gives no reason. The final flourish, in which the last of the plain dough is enriched with sugar, lard and eggs for biscuits, is thrift rather than invention: one mixing, one oven firing, two kinds of bread on the table.