Dry Yeast
Boil two large potatoes and a handful of hops (the latter in a bag) in three pints water; when done, take out potatoes, mash well, add one pint flour, and pour boiling hot water over all; beat well together, adding one table-spoon salt, one of ginger, and one-half cup sugar; when luke-warm add one cup good yeast and let stand two days (or only one day, if very warm weather), stirring down frequently; add good white corn meal until thick enough to make into cakes about half an inch in thickness; place to dry in the shade (never expose to the sun or to stove heat) where the air will pass freely, so as to dry them as soon as possible, as the fermentation goes on as long as there is any moisture; turn the cakes frequently, breaking them up somewhat, or even crumbling, so they will dry out evenly and quickly; when thoroughly dried put in a paper sack, and keep in a dry place. A small cake will make a sponge sufficient to bake five or six ordinary loaves. --Mrs. E. T. Carson.
This is a nineteenth-century method for propagating and preserving a household baking yeast, not a bread recipe. The cakes it produces are the ancestor of the dry yeast packet, and the whole procedure turns on one thing: getting them dry fast, in cool moving air.
- The hinge: dryingFermentation continues as long as moisture remains, and a cake that dries slowly will sour or mould before it dries. Break the cakes up, turn them often, and keep them in a shaded draught — sustained heat well above blood heat will kill the yeast, so the warning against sun and stove is not superstition.
- "One cup good yeast"This means a cup of active liquid yeast from a previous batch or a neighbour's crock, the way sourdough is kept going. Without a live starter the recipe has nothing to inoculate; a modern equivalent would be a vigorous liquid levain, which will behave differently from a packet of commercial yeast.
- MeasuresThree pints is 6 cups; a pint of flour is 2 cups by volume, about 8 to 9 oz. "Two large potatoes" is roughly a pound. The sugar feeds the yeast; the ginger was traditionally held to stimulate fermentation rather than to flavour the bread.
- HopsAbout a handful, loose dried hop flowers, tied in cheesecloth. Beyond bitterness they suppress the lactic bacteria that turn a yeast crock sour, which is why so many old yeasts are hop yeasts. Any bittering variety works; the quantity is not critical.
- Corn meal"Good white corn meal" is plain stone-ground white cornmeal, not self-rising mix and not masa. It is a carrier and a drying agent — it soaks up the batter so the mass can be shaped and dehydrated.
- Two days at room temperatureThe stand is a deliberate build, stirred down frequently to knock back the foam. In hot weather a single day is enough, as the recipe allows.
- Keeping and usingStored dry and cool, these cakes lose vigour over time. The yield note of five or six loaves refers to the sponge a small cake will raise, not to the cake alone.
- Whether to botherAs a working baking yeast this is far slower and less predictable than what is sold today. It is worth making as an exercise in how a kitchen kept its own culture alive; expect long, uncertain rises.
Before yeast could be bought reliably, a household either kept a liquid yeast going in a crock, begged barm from a brewer, or dried its own cakes as here. Hop yeasts of this kind were common in the nineteenth century, the hops acting as a mild preservative against souring, and cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s often give several variants — potato yeast, milk yeast, salt-rising — under a single Yeast heading, as Buckeye Cookery does. Compressed fresh yeast was becoming commercially available in American cities in the decades after the Civil War and is generally credited with displacing the home yeast crock, but the change came slowly and unevenly, and a rural Ohio kitchen in 1877 still expected to make its own. The attribution to Mrs. E. T. Carson is characteristic of the book, which was assembled from contributions by named women and reads as a record of what particular households actually did.