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Good Bread
For four small loaves boil four large potatoes; when done, pour off the water, and when it cools add to it a yeast cake; mash the potato very fine, put through a sieve, pour boiling milk on as much flour as is needed, let stand until cool, add the potato and yeast, a large tea-spoon of salt and one table-spoon of sugar; stir very stiff, adding flour as is needed. Let stand in a warm place until light, dissolve one tea-spoon of soda in a little hot water, mix well through with the hands, mold into loaves, and let rise again. When sufficiently raised place in a moderately hot oven, keeping up a steady fire.-Mrs. Governor Hardin, Missouri.
A potato-water bread of the kind that filled American kitchens before commercial yeast was reliable. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what bread dough should feel like, so the useful work is in filling the gaps.
- The hinge: keep the potato water warm, not hotThe yeast cake goes into the cooking water once it has cooled. Water much above about 110F starts to stress the yeast and hotter still will kill it outright, and this dough has no other leavening worth the name. Blood-warm to the wrist is the old test and it still works.
- Yeast cakeIn 1877 this meant either a compressed cake or a dried homemade cake of yeast and cornmeal, both far weaker and less predictable than modern yeast. One packet of active dry yeast, about 2 1/4 teaspoons, stands in for it, with the understanding that your dough will be ready in hours rather than most of a day.
- The soda is a correction, not a leavenerA teaspoon of soda kneaded in before shaping is there to neutralize the acidity of a slow, warm, possibly overnight first rise. With modern yeast working quickly there is nothing to neutralize, and a full teaspoon in four small loaves will give a soapy taste and a yellowish crumb. Omit it, or use a scant quarter teaspoon if the risen dough smells sharply sour.
- Scalded flourPouring boiling milk over the flour and letting it cool makes a soft, sweet-keeping crumb by gelatinizing some of the starch. The recipe gives no proportion, only 'as much flour as is needed', so judge it by hand, and let the mixture come down to lukewarm before the yeast goes anywhere near it.
- QuantitiesFour large potatoes and their cooking water, with milk and flour to suit, comes to something in the range of 8 to 10 cups of flour. The recipe is deliberately open-ended; work to a dough that is stiff but still tacky rather than to a number.
- Moderately hot ovenNot a fixed figure; somewhere in the 375 to 425F range suits small loaves. "Keeping up a steady fire" is a wood-stove instruction meaning do not let the heat fall away mid-bake; a modern oven does this by itself. Small loaves take 30 to 40 minutes and are done at 190 to 200F internal.
- YieldFour small loaves; the recipe gives no weight or pan size. Potato bread stales slowly and keeps two or three days wrapped at room temperature.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877), compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox, gathered its contributions from housekeepers across the Midwest and beyond, including a run of recipes credited to governors' wives, which is why this one arrives signed "Mrs. Governor Hardin, Missouri" rather than with a name of her own. Potato bread itself was thoroughly practical: the starchy cooking water fed the yeast, the mashed potato held moisture so the loaf stayed soft longer than a plain flour bread, and potatoes stretched flour in seasons when flour cost more. The teaspoon of soda at the end is the telling detail. Before dependable yeast, the first rise might run overnight or longer, and the dough turned sour; generations of bread recipes carry this small alkaline correction as a matter of course, a habit that quietly disappeared once commercial yeast made rising fast and predictable.