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Bread with Potato Sponge
Pare and boil four or five potatoes, mash fine, and add one pint of flour; pour on the mixture first boiling water enough to moisten well, then about one quart of cold water, after which add flour enough to make a stiff batter. When cooled to "scarcely milk warm," put in one-half pint (or more will do no harm) of yeast, and let it stand in a warm place over night; in the morning add to this sponge one cup of lard, stir in flour, and knead well. The more kneading the finer and whiter the bread will be; pounding also with a potato-masher improves the bread greatly, and is rather easier than so much kneading. When quite stiff and well worked and pounded, let it rise again, and when light, make into loaves or biscuit, adding no more flour except to flour the hands and boardmerely enough to prevent the bread from sticking. Let it rise again, then bake; and immediately after taking from the oven, wrap in a wet towel until partly cold, in order to soften the crust. If yeast and flour are good (essentials in all cases), the above process will make good bread. - Mrs. Clara Morey, Marysville, Ohio.
A nineteenth-century potato sponge bread, written for cooks who kept a jar of homemade liquid yeast on hand. The method still works, but several quantities need translating and one ingredient is missing entirely.
- No salt in the originalThe recipe as printed calls for none, though the omission may simply be an oversight or an assumption the cook would salt by habit. Bread without salt tastes flat and rises too fast; figure roughly 2 teaspoons of fine salt per 4 cups of flour, worked in with the lard.
- The yeast is the real substitution"One-half pint of yeast" is a full cup of homemade potato or hop yeast, a thin liquid barm far weaker than modern dried yeast. Use about 1 teaspoon of instant yeast for the overnight sponge, or a cup of active sourdough starter; a cup of commercial yeast slurry would be wildly overproofed.
- "Scarcely milk warm"Somewhere around 85-95F, just under blood heat. The instruction matters because the boiling water that gelatinizes the potato starch will kill yeast outright; wait for the full quart of cold water to bring the mash down before adding yeast.
- Quantities are open-endedFour or five potatoes plus a pint of flour and a quart-plus of water makes a very large sponge, and "flour enough" is left to judgment. You may well use 10-12 cups of flour in total and get three or four generous loaves; halve everything for a household batch.
- A cup of lardThat is about 7 ounces of fat, which gives a soft, close, long-keeping crumb rather than a lean loaf. Shortening or butter works; butter adds water, so hold back a spoonful or two of liquid.
- Oven temperatureNone is given because none could be. Bake loaves at 375-400F for 35-45 minutes, to an internal temperature of about 200F.
- Pounding with a potato masherThis is not folklore. Repeated compression develops gluten much as kneading does, and with a wet, enriched dough it is genuinely less work. A stand mixer with a dough hook accomplishes the same thing in eight to ten minutes.
- The wet towelWrapping the hot loaf traps escaping steam and softens the crust, the opposite of the crackling crust modern bakers chase. Skip it if you want crust; it does not affect the crumb.
- KeepingPotato bread stales slowly because the gelatinized potato starch holds water. These loaves stay good two or three days at room temperature and freeze well.
Potato sponge bread belongs to the era before packaged yeast, when a household kept its leaven alive from bake to bake and needed something to feed it. Boiled potato supplied sugars and starch that a weak barm could work on quickly, and it forgave a great deal of variation in a yeast whose strength no one could measure. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Marysville, Ohio, and published there in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping — the same compilation having already appeared in 1876 as the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book — was assembled from contributions by named local women, which is why this page ends with Mrs. Clara Morey's signature rather than an editor's. Her closing remark that good yeast and good flour are "essentials in all cases" is the honest heart of the whole bread chapter: with wild-caught leaven and unstandardized flour, the same written method could give a fine white loaf one week and a heavy one the next, and cooks judged by feel and smell rather than by timing.