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Bread with Buttermilk
The evening before baking, bring to the boiling point two quarts of buttermilk (or boil sour milk and take the same quantity of the whey), and pour into a crock in which a scant tea-cup of sifted flour has been placed. Let stand till sufficiently cool, then add half a cup of yeast, and flour to make a thick batter; the better and longer the sponge is stirred the whiter will be the bread. In the morning sift the flour into the bread-pan, pour the sponge in the center, stir in some of the flour, and let stand until after breakfast; then mix, kneading for about half an hour, the longer the better; when light, mold into loaves, this time kneading as little as possible. The secret of good bread is having good yeast, and not baking too hard. This makes four loaves and forty biscuit. -Mrs. M. C. Moore, Granville, Ohio.
A large overnight sponge bread from a household that baked once or twice a week. The quantities are enormous by modern standards and the yeast is not the yeast you have.
- Scale firstTwo quarts of buttermilk plus the flour it will carry gives four loaves and forty biscuits — very roughly 10 to 12 lb of dough. Quartering the recipe brings it down to one loaf and ten biscuits, and fits an ordinary mixing bowl.
- "Half a cup of yeast"This means liquid homemade yeast, a thin fermented barm, not anything sold today. Substitute about 1/2 teaspoon of instant dry yeast per quart of liquid for an overnight sponge; more will exhaust itself before morning.
- Scalding the buttermilkBringing buttermilk to the boil curdles it; scalding is generally held to denature the whey proteins that would otherwise slacken the gluten, though the recipe itself gives no reason. The curds and whey both go into the crock. The sour-milk option uses only the whey, with the solids left behind.
- "Let stand till sufficiently cool"Below 110F before the yeast goes in. Scalded milk poured straight onto yeast kills it, which is the likeliest failure point in the whole method.
- Crock and bread-panThe crock is a glazed stoneware jar for the sponge; any non-reactive bowl does. The "bread-pan" is the large wooden or tin trough the whole batch was mixed in, not a loaf tin.
- Flour is unmeasuredThe recipe gives no total, as was normal — you added flour until the dough felt right. Work to a soft, slightly tacky dough; overshooting produces the heavy loaf this method is trying to avoid.
- Half an hour of kneadingSound advice for hand-kneading a stiff dough with pre-1900 flour. Modern strong bread flour in a stand mixer is developed in 8 to 10 minutes on medium; keep the instruction to knead the shaped loaves as little as possible.
- "Not baking too hard"Read this as 375 to 400F rather than the fierce brick-oven heat of a wood fire. Bake until the internal temperature reaches about 200F.
Buttermilk bread of this kind belongs to the era when every dairying household had sour milk or churn buttermilk on hand daily and packaged yeast was not yet in general household use. The overnight sponge did double duty: it gave the weak, unpredictable homemade barm twelve hours to multiply, and the scalded acidic milk conditioned the soft winter-wheat flour common in Ohio into something that would hold a loaf. Buckeye Cookery (1877, compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives) prints dozens of such signed recipes, and the attribution of this page to Mrs. M. C. Moore of Granville is consistent with that practice these books were community records as much as instruction manuals. The closing line, "the secret of good bread is having good yeast, and not baking too hard," points at the two variables a cook of the period could least control: the health of her yeast pot and the heat of her oven.