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Sponge for Winter Use
Peel and boil four or five medium-sized potatoes in two quarts of water (which will boil down to one quart by thet ime the potatoes, are cooked): when done, take out and press through a colander, (r mash very fine in the crock in which the sponge is to be made; make a well in the center, into which put one cup of flour, and pour over it the boiling water from the potatoes; stir thoroughly, and when cool add a pint of tepid water, flour enough to make a thin batter, and a cup of yeast. This sponge makes very moist bread.
This is not a finished bread but the overnight pre-ferment that a nineteenth-century household kept going through the cold months. Read it as the first stage of a loaf: you will still need salt, more flour, and a shaping and baking step.
- Let the scalded flour coolThe cup of flour is cooked by the boiling potato water, which gelatinises the starch and is plausibly why the recipe promises very moist bread. Yeast added while that paste is still hot will be killed, so follow the recipe and wait until the mixture is properly cool -- lukewarm at most -- before the pint of tepid water and the yeast go in.
- "A cup of yeast"This means a cup of liquid barm or homemade potato yeast, not dried granules. A packet of modern active dry or instant yeast (about 2 1/4 teaspoons) will do the same work, though it ferments faster and less sourly; if you keep a liquid starter, a cup of it is the closer match.
- The crockA glazed stoneware jar of a gallon or more. Any large bowl works, but the sponge will rise a good deal, so allow roughly twice the volume you start with and cover it.
- The water measurementTwo quarts boiled down to one is the point of the instruction, not the starting amount. Use a wide pan and check the level; if your potatoes cook before the water reduces, lift them out and keep boiling the liquid down to a quart.
- PotatoesAny floury variety, russet or similar; four or five medium potatoes is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 lb total. The mashed potato itself goes into the sponge along with the water, which is why the batter thickens more than flour alone would suggest.
- "Flour enough to make a thin batter"Aim for something the consistency of thick pancake batter, pourable but holding a trace when stirred. The recipe gives no quantity, so add flour gradually until it is slack rather than doughy; the stiffening happens the next morning.
- "For winter use"The title most likely refers to the season in which the sponge is made rather than to any keeping quality, though the recipe does not say. Set the covered crock somewhere around 70-75F; a cold room will stall it, and a spot on a modern radiator will over-ferment it into something sour and thin.
Potato sponges and potato yeasts were common in American home baking before commercial compressed yeast became reliable and cheap, and potato water carries some sugars that fermenting yeast can use. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio in 1876 from contributions by many women, devotes a great deal of space to bread, the one thing a household made every few days and could not easily buy well. The scalded-flour step here works on a principle comparable to the cooked flour-and-water paste later known in Asian baking as tangzhong, in which part of the flour is cooked before mixing so the dough holds extra water.