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Bread, Home-Made
Make a cavity in the middle of a quartern of flour, and stir into it a pint of warm milk or water, four table-spoonfuls of good yeast, and a little salt. Cover it up and set it before the fire to rise. If set overnight make up next morning, then add half a pint more milk or water, and knead it into a dough for ten minutes. Set it by the fire for one hour and a half, then make into loaves, and bake from one hour and a half to two hours, according to size. If equal quantities of meal and flour be used, this will make an excellent brown bread.
A plain sponge-and-dough loaf of the kind baked weekly in Victorian households, written for a cook who already knew what bread should feel like. Two things need supplying: the size of a quartern, and an oven temperature, since the original gives neither.
- A quartern of flourA quartern is a quarter of a peck, about 3.5 lb of flour, roughly 12-13 cups; it is the flour for a standard 4 lb quartern loaf. It is a large batch, enough for two or three good-sized loaves. Halve or quarter it if you are not feeding a household.
- The liquid is light on purposeA pint at the sponge stage and a half pint more at kneading is a pint and a half in all, about 30 fl oz imperial, to 3.5 lb of flour: a stiff dough by modern standards. Flour of the period varied in strength and absorbency, so expect to adjust the water by the spoonful until the dough is firm but not dry.
- "Good yeast"This means barm or brewer's yeast, a liquid leaven of variable strength. Four tablespoons of it corresponds very roughly to 2-3 teaspoons of instant dried yeast for this quantity of flour, but the substitution is approximate and the dough should be judged by rise, not clock.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the reader was expected to judge her own oven. For a modern oven, bake at 425-450F for the first fifteen minutes, then drop to 375-400F for the remainder. A large loaf is done at an internal 200-205F and sounds hollow underneath.
- The baking time is for very large loavesNinety minutes to two hours suits a 2 lb loaf or larger. A standard 1.5 lb tin loaf will be finished in 35-45 minutes, and holding it to the stated time will dry it to a brick.
- Setting it overnightThe instruction to "set it overnight" and make up in the morning is a long cool sponge, not an error. Do this in a cool room or the refrigerator; a warm kitchen for eight hours will overferment the sponge and leave the bread sour and slack.
- Knead longer than ten minutes by handTen minutes assumes strong arms working a very stiff dough on a board. With a mixer, 8-10 minutes on medium is ample; by hand, work until the dough passes a windowpane test rather than counting.
- "Meal and flour" for brown bread"Meal" here most likely means wheatmeal, the whole grain stone-ground. Half wholemeal and half white gives a denser loaf that wants a slightly wetter dough and a shorter final proof, since the bran cuts the gluten.
The quartern loaf was the standard unit of British bread and, for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the standard measure of the cost of living: its price was quoted in newspapers and debated in Parliament, and the Assize of Bread regulated both the price and the weight of the loaf until its repeal in London in 1815 and in the rest of the country in 1836. A recipe like this one appears in Cassell's at a time when commercial bakers were widely suspected of adulterating flour with alum and worse, and domestic manuals pressed the case that a household with an oven should make its own. The "good yeast" of the instruction is barm skimmed from brewing, the usual leaven before compressed baker's yeast became reliably available in Britain in the later nineteenth century, and the recipe offers the overnight sponge as an option for the baker working with it.