Farmers' Yeast
A yeast which is especially good for the use of farmers, and others who use a great deal of bread and bake frequently, is made as follows: Take a handful of unpressed or two ounces of pressed hops (those showing the pollen dust are best), put them in one quart of water, with four ordinary potatoes, and boil till the potatoes are well cooked; mash all together, and strain through a linen strainer, add flour enough to make a thick batter; a tea-spoon salt, a tablespoon pulverized ginger and half a cup sugar; set it back on the fire and let it come to a boil, stirring constantly, and set by to cool; when only milk warm add a cup of old yeast, or two cakes grocers' dry hop yeast, or half a cup bakers'. This will be light in two or three hours. The yeast may be made perpetual, by saving a cup when started, but it must be kept from freezing in winter and in a cool place in summer. This is a good mode, and acceptable to all who prefer yeast bread. - Mrs. H. Young, Minneapolis, Minn.
This is a liquid bread starter, not a bread recipe: the hop-and-potato decoction feeds a small quantity of live yeast, which is then held over and re-fed indefinitely. A few of the ingredients and all of the measures need translation.
- The hinge: "only milk warm"Everything depends on cooling the boiled batter to blood heat, roughly 95-105F, before the seed yeast goes in. Added hot it kills the culture outright; added cold it simply sits. This is the one step that decides whether the batch works.
- HopsWhole dried hop cones, sold by weight for homebrewing. Two ounces of pressed hops is a large amount by modern standards and gives a distinctly bitter, resinous liquid; the bitterness is functional, since hop acids suppress the bacteria that would sour the starter. "Showing the pollen dust" means visible yellow lupulin, the sign of fresh, resinous cones.
- "Four ordinary potatoes"Read this as roughly a pound to a pound and a half of starchy potatoes; the recipe does not say whether to peel them. They are there for starch and yeast nutrients, not bulk, and the exact count matters less than the final consistency.
- Thick batterAfter straining you will have somewhat less than the starting quart. Add flour until it pours like thick pancake batter, then boil it briefly with constant stirring; this gelatinizes the starch, which the flour's own enzymes can then break down into sugars for the yeast. Expect it to thicken sharply and catch easily on the pan bottom.
- The seed yeast"Old yeast" is a cup of a previous batch of this same liquid starter. "Grocers' dry hop yeast" cakes and bakers' compressed yeast were commercial products of the later nineteenth-century trade, of uncertain and variable composition and strength compared with modern active dry or instant yeast, so no honest cake-for-packet conversion exists. If you have no established starter, seed it with a small amount of ordinary bread yeast and accept that the culture will drift toward whatever wild flora the hop liquid tolerates.
- Ginger and sugarPulverized ginger is simply ground dried ginger. Both it and the half cup of sugar were understood to speed the ferment; the sugar does, the ginger is traditional practice rather than anything measurable.
- "Light in two or three hours"That means foamed up and smelling actively yeasty. At modern room temperatures nearer 68F it will take longer, and the kitchens this was written for were often warmer than ours.
- Keeping itBottle loosely, never sealed tight, and refrigerate. The original's "cool place in summer" is a cellar; a refrigerator does the job better. A starter this wet and sugary spoils in a way you can smell and see, and anything cheesy, pink, orange or fuzzy goes down the drain rather than into dough.
- Yield and useAbout a quart. Period bread recipes typically call for something on the order of half a cup to a cup of liquid yeast for a small batch of dough, so treat that as a starting point rather than a rule. Set aside a cup before you bake, not after, or you will find you have used the whole thing.
Buckeye Cookery devotes a full section to yeast because in 1877 many households were still likely to keep their own. Reliable compressed yeast was still spreading unevenly, and it reached farms last of all, so a self-perpetuating hop starter was infrastructure rather than a hobby. Hops did more than flavor: their resin acids inhibit lactic and acetic bacteria, which is why hop-based starters kept sweeter and longer than plain flour-and-water ones. The potato supplied starch and minerals, the sugar a quick meal for the culture, and the whole thing was kept alive by the same logic as a sourdough today, a cup held back each time. That the contributor writes from Minneapolis and warns first about freezing tells you where and how these books were actually used.