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Rye Bread (Make a sponge of one quart)
Make a sponge of one quart warm water, one tea cup yeast, thickened with rye flour; put in warm place to rise over night; scald one pint corn meal; when cool add it to sponge, and add rye flour till thick enough to knead, knead but little, let rise, mold into loaves, place in deep pie-tins or small pudding-pans, let rise and bake; or, thicken the sponge with rye flour, and proceed as above. Wheat sponge may be used instead of rye. - Mrs. Eliza T. Carson, Delaware, Ohio.
A two-stage overnight bread: a loose rye sponge worked the night before, enriched next morning with scalded cornmeal. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what a risen sponge looks like, and they give no times, temperatures or yield.
- The teacup of yeastThis means homemade liquid yeast or a saved barm, not packaged yeast; a period tea-cup is usually reckoned at roughly three-quarters of a cup of active, bubbling starter. A well-fed sourdough starter at similar hydration is the closest equivalent; with commercial yeast, a scant half-teaspoon of instant yeast should be enough to carry a quart of sponge overnight in a cool room, and a heavier dose risks the sponge peaking and falling before morning.
- Knead but littleThis is the hinge. Rye contains almost no gluten-forming protein and a great deal of pentosan gum, so extended kneading only makes the dough slick and sticky without building structure. Mix until uniform and stop.
- Scalding the cornmealPouring boiling water over a pint of cornmeal gelatinizes the starch, which holds moisture in the finished loaf and keeps the crumb from turning dry and crumbly. It must cool to lukewarm before it meets the sponge or it will kill the yeast.
- Deep pie-tins and pudding-pansRye-and-corn dough is slack and will not hold a free-standing shape. Straight-sided pans give it something to climb; standard loaf pans work as well as the round tins specified.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the cook was expected to judge her own oven. For a modern one, bake at 400F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F. A dense rye needs a long bake — count on 45 to 60 minutes for a loaf of this size.
- Judging donenessThe hollow-knock test is unreliable on a moist rye. Bake to an internal temperature of 205 to 210F, and let the loaves cool completely before cutting; the gums in rye continue to set for hours, and a warm loaf slices gummy.
- Rising timesExpect the overnight sponge to take 8 to 12 hours in a cool kitchen, then about an hour for the bulk rise and another 45 to 60 minutes in the pans. Rye ferments quickly and collapses if pushed past its peak, so watch the dough rather than the clock.
- YieldThis is a large batch: a quart of water plus a pint of cornmeal and the rye needed to stiffen it will fill more than two pans, so expect roughly three or four loaves depending on the size of the tins.
Rye and cornmeal baked together is one of the oldest American bread traditions — colonial New England called it "rye and Injun," a loaf born of the fact that wheat grew poorly in much of the Northeast while rye and maize did well. By 1877, when Buckeye Cookery was assembled in Ohio from contributions by named local women, wheat flour was cheap and abundant, and rye bread was as often a matter of preference as of necessity: darker, denser, longer-keeping, and sometimes recommended on the period's vague digestive grounds. The recipe's closing offer — that a wheat sponge may be used instead of rye — is a reminder that the overnight sponge was the fixed step in a nineteenth-century kitchen, raised from a yeast or barm kept alive from bake to bake, with the grain chosen from whatever was in the bin.