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Yeast (Pare and boil four)
Pare and boil four ordinary-sized potatoes, boiling at the same time in a separate vessel a good handful of hops. When the potatoes are done, mash fine and add, after straining, the water in which the hops were boiled; put into this one cup white sugar and onehalf cup salt, and add sufficient water to make one gallon; when cold add one cup of good yeast, let stand in a warm place for a few hours until it will "sing" on being stirred, when it is ready for use. Keep covered in a cellar or cool place. - Mrs. C. M.
This is a liquid bread leaven, not a dough — a gallon of potato-and-hop wort kept alive in the cellar and dipped into whenever bread was set. A cup or so of it does the work of a packet of dry yeast.
- What it is forThe finished gallon is a starter for bread. The recipe gives no dose; a cup or so per large batch, with some held back to seed the next making, is the usual practice in books of this kind. It is not a drink, and the salt content alone makes that clear.
- HopsA "good handful" of dried whole hops is perhaps half an ounce, though the recipe gives no weight; they are sold today for homebrewing. They contribute bitterness and, more to the point, antibacterial compounds that keep the liquid from souring. Any bittering variety will do; the recipe strains them out.
- "Good yeast"The original assumes you already have a live starter from a neighbour or a previous batch. To begin from nothing, one packet (about 2 1/4 tsp) of active dry yeast, slaked in warm water first, will seed the gallon.
- Temperature at pitchingThe recipe says "when cold," i.e. cool enough not to kill the yeast. The potato and hop water comes off the stove near boiling; let it drop to 100F or below — cooler does no harm — before adding the seed.
- The singingThe hinge of the recipe. A ripe hop yeast fizzes audibly against the side of the crock when stirred — a fine sustained hiss from escaping carbon dioxide. The recipe allows "a few hours" in a warm place; in a cool kitchen it may take considerably longer. Silence means it is not ready or has not taken.
- Salt and sugarHalf a cup of salt in a gallon reads as a lot, but it is a preservative for unrefrigerated keeping, and it slows the ferment rather than stopping it. Bread made with this leaven needs its own salt reduced accordingly.
- Cool placeA nineteenth-century cellar ran around 50-55F. A refrigerator is colder but safer; expect the yeast to keep a week or two, and to need feeding with a little sugar and potato water to revive. Discard it if it smells of vinegar, cheese or nail polish, or grows any coloured film.
- Vessel and headspaceUse a crock, jar or bucket of at least six quarts for a gallon of liquid, covered but not sealed. An airtight lid on an active ferment builds pressure.
Hop yeast was one of several common American household leavens before packaged yeast, and Buckeye Cookery (1877) devotes a whole section to home leavens — potato yeast, milk yeast, salt-rising, hop yeast in cake and in liquid form. The logic is straightforward: potato gives the starch and sugar, the boiled hop water gives bitterness and a measure of protection against the lactic bacteria that would otherwise turn the crock sour, and a cup of an existing batch carries the living culture forward. Brewers had understood the preservative value of hops for centuries, and the kitchen borrowed it. Contributions signed with initials, as here, are typical of the book, which was assembled from recipes gathered among Ohio housewives; the compilers printed the attributions as they received them. Compressed yeast cakes sold by commercial firms were already spreading in the 1870s and 1880s, and within a generation they had largely retired the cellar crock.