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BREAD, HOUSEHOLD (another way)
It often happens that household bread, from a little want of care, is found bitter and unpalatable. To remedy this, the yeast or barm should be put into water overnight. Next day peel and boil three pounds of potatoes, beating them to a pulp, and pass through a colander, with a pint of cold water to half a pint of good sweet yeast. Mix the potato pulp and yeast thoroughly together, and then pour it into a hollow made in the middle of one peck of flour. Stir some of the flour into the mixture till it is like a thick batter, then cover with a little of the dry flour, throw a cloth over the pan, and set it near the fire to rise. In about an hour mix it with five pints of lukewarm water and two ounces of salt, to a dough. Cover it up again as before, and let it stand this time about two hours, then knead it into loaves, and bake for an hour and a half in a good oven. Probable cost, about 6d. per four-pound loaf.
A large-scale potato bread built on brewer's barm rather than packaged yeast. The whole point of the recipe is the anti-bitterness treatment at the start, and that is the part that no longer applies in a modern kitchen.
- Why the bitternessHousehold bread of this period was raised with barm skimmed from brewing, which carried hop resin and dead yeast with it. Standing the barm in water overnight let the bitter matter settle and be poured off. Modern dried or fresh baker's yeast has no bitterness, so this step can be dropped entirely.
- "Half a pint of good sweet yeast"This is liquid barm of unknown strength, and there is no honest conversion to dried yeast. Treat the quantity as unusable and pitch by the flour weight instead.
- A peck of flourA peck is a dry measure of two gallons; for flour it was commonly reckoned at about 14 lb. With five pints of water plus the pint in the potatoes, this is a batch of roughly five four-pound loaves. Quarter it for a domestic bake.
- The potatoesThree pounds of boiled, mashed and sieved potato to 14 lb flour is a little over 20 per cent by weight. It softens the crumb, extends the flour and keeps the loaf fresh longer. Use a floury variety and rice or sieve it while hot, with no lumps, or the dough will tear.
- The spongeStirring flour into the potato-and-yeast liquid to a thick batter and dusting it with dry flour is a sponge. The cracking of that flour lid is the visual signal it is ready, which the hour given here is only an approximation of.
- SaltTwo ounces to a peck of flour is only about 0.9 per cent, well below the modern norm of around 2 per cent. Note it goes in with the second water, not into the sponge, which is deliberate.
- "A good oven"No temperature is given, and none can be read off the phrase; for bread it would have meant a hot oven, in modern terms somewhere around 425-450F, ideally falling as the bake goes on. Ninety minutes suits four-pound loaves only; a one-pound tin loaf wants 30-35 minutes, and the loaf should sound hollow and read about 200F inside.
- Rising timesAn hour for the sponge and two hours for the dough assume a cool kitchen and a fireside. In a modern heated room both will move faster. Judge by volume and by the dough springing back slowly to a finger.
Before packaged yeast, households that baked their own bread commonly raised it with barm begged or bought from a brewer, and its quality varied with whoever had been brewing. Hoppy barm made bitter bread, which is exactly the complaint this entry opens with; washing and settling the barm was frequently given advice in nineteenth-century cookery books. The potato is doing economic work as much as culinary work. Flour was the expensive ingredient, potatoes were not, and a bread stretched with potato pulp kept moist longer than a plain one, which mattered when baking day came once a week. The costing in pence per four-pound loaf is characteristic of Cassell's, which was written for households running to a budget and quoted prices so a cook could weigh baking against buying from the baker.