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Salt-Rising Bread
The leaven for this bread is prepared thus: Take a pint of warm water-about 90°-(if a little too hot defeat is certain) in a perfectly clean bowl and stir up a thick batter, adding only a tea-spoon of salt; a thorough beating of the batter is important. Set in a pan of warm water to secure uniformity of temperature, and in two to four hours it will begin to rise. The rising is much more sure if coarse flour or "shorts" is used instead of fine flour. When your "rising" is nearly light enough, take a pint of milk and a pint of boiling water, (a table-spoon of lime water added is good, and often prevents souring), mix the sponge in the bread-pan, and when cooled to about milk-warm, stir in the rising. The sponge thus made will be light in two to four hours, with good warmth. The dough requires less kneading than yeast-raised dough. The bread is simpler, but not so certain of rising, and you leave out all the ingredients save the flour, water (milk is not essential), and a pinch of salt. It should be made more frequently as it dries faster than bread containing potatoes. Some object to it because of the odor in rising, which is the result of acetous fermentation, but the more of that the more sure you are of having sweet bread when baked.-Mrs. H. Young, Minneapolis, Minn.
Salt-rising bread has no yeast in it at all; it relies on wild bacteria carried in on the flour, which means the whole recipe hinges on holding a narrow temperature for hours. Mrs. Young gives proportions loosely, as was normal for a cook who made bread daily.
- The hinge: steady warmthShe calls for water at about 90F and warns that if it is a little too hot "defeat is certain." Salt-rising ferments are generally held somewhere in the region of 100-115F, and much hotter than that will stall or kill them. Her pan of warm water is a water bath; a proofing box, a turned-off oven with the light on, or a yogurt maker does the same job, and it is the difference between a working ferment and a bowl of paste.
- "A thick batter" is unmeasuredA pint of water stirred to a thick batter takes roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour, but the original gives no figure and the consistency is what matters: thick enough to hold a stirred furrow, not pourable. Treat the amount as something to judge by eye.
- "Shorts"Shorts are the coarse wheat middlings left after milling, still carrying bran and germ. They work because the bacteria live on the outside of the grain, which is stripped away in white flour. Stone-ground whole wheat or coarse cornmeal is the closest modern stand-in; bleached all-purpose flour is the least likely to start.
- Lime waterA saturated solution of calcium hydroxide, once kept in kitchens as a mild alkali. It buffers the acid the ferment produces, which is why she says it prevents souring. Food-grade pickling lime dissolved in water is the same thing, and the tablespoon called for is a very small dose.
- The smellThe sharp cheesy odor during rising is the ferment working, not spoilage, and her instinct is sound. The organisms involved are bacteria rather than yeast, which is why the loaf smells nothing like a yeast sponge and why the finished crumb tastes faintly tangy.
- Baking, which she omits entirelyDivide the risen dough between greased 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch pans, let it come just above the rim, and bake at around 375F for 45 to 50 minutes, to an internal 200-210F. The loaf browns readily because of the milk.
- Yield and keepingThree pints of liquid in total: a pint in the leaven, then a pint of milk and a pint of boiling water. The recipe gives no yield, and that quantity will fill more than two standard pans. Her warning about it drying faster than potato bread holds: the crumb is close and dense, and by the second day it is a toasting bread.
- Expect failuresShe is honest that it is "not so certain of rising." If the leaven shows no bubbles and no smell well past four hours it is unlikely to recover; starting again with coarser flour and a warmer bath is usually better than waiting it out.
Salt-rising bread is associated with Appalachia and the Ohio Valley and is generally said to have travelled west with settlers in the nineteenth century. Buckeye Cookery (1877) grew out of an Ohio compilation but was itself published in Minneapolis, so a Minneapolis contributor is not in itself evidence of that migration. The name is generally explained two ways -- that the starter was bedded in a crock of warm salt to hold its heat, or simply that salt is nearly the only thing added besides flour and water -- but both are traditional explanations rather than documented ones. Its appeal in a period before reliable packaged yeast was independence: no brewer's yeast to beg, no hop-and-potato "emptyings" jar to keep alive, and the book's bread chapter carries a number of such contingency methods, each contributor vouching for the one that worked in her own kitchen. The fermentation is bacterial rather than yeast-driven, which accounts for both the pungent rising smell that Mrs. Young defends and the fine, tight crumb that distinguishes the loaf from anything raised with yeast.