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Bread, Household
To ten pounds of flour in a kneading-trough put a small handful of salt. Stir into this about two quarts of water, more or less, as some kinds of flour absorb more water than others. For very white bread, made with superfine flour, the dough should be softer than for seconds or brown bread. In summer the water may be lakewarm; in winter, considerably warmer, but never hot enough to kill the yeast. After the water is mixed with the flour, add a cupful of good yeast, then knead the bread, and leave it to rise in a warm place, covered with a cloth. If all goes well, it will rise sufficiently in the course of an hour or an hour and a half. Then divide it into rolls, loaves, or tin-bread, as wanted, and bake. For a three-pound loaf take three pounds and a half of dough; for a four-pound loaf, four pounds eleven ounces; for a six-pound loaf, six pounds and three-quarters; while for an eight-pound loaf, nine pounds should be allowed.
A working baker's formula scaled for a household that baked ten pounds of flour at a time. Most of it translates directly; the yeast quantity and the oven are where the original assumes knowledge the modern kitchen no longer has.
- Scale it down firstTen pounds of flour is roughly 36 cups and yields about fourteen pounds of dough, or four large loaves. Divide everything by five for a manageable two-pound batch.
- The water looks lowTwo quarts to ten pounds of flour works out at roughly 40 to 50 per cent hydration depending on whether the quarts are read as American or imperial; either way a very stiff dough by current standards, where most bread runs 60-65 per cent. Victorian household bread was deliberately firm, but the recipe's own hedge -- "more or less, as some kinds of flour absorb more water" -- is the instruction to follow. Expect to add appreciably more with modern flour.
- "Lakewarm"A period spelling of lukewarm, around body temperature. The warning about heat is real: yeast begins to die above roughly 130F, so winter water should be warm to the hand and no more.
- A cupful of yeast is not a cup of granulesThis means liquid barm -- the yeasty froth skimmed from brewing ale -- or a soft home-grown leaven, mostly water by volume. There is no honest conversion. For a one to one-and-a-half hour rise, work from modern practice instead: about 1 per cent instant dried yeast by flour weight.
- SaltA small handful for ten pounds is around 1.5 to 2 oz, roughly 1 per cent. Current bread is usually salted at closer to 2 per cent, so taste and adjust on the first batch.
- Seconds and superfineSuperfine is the whitest, most highly sifted flour; "seconds" is a lower grade carrying some bran and germ, between white and wholemeal. Plain strong white flour stands in for superfine; a white-wholemeal blend approximates seconds.
- One rise onlyThe recipe proves, divides and bakes. A second rise after shaping -- 30 to 45 minutes, until the loaf springs back slowly -- gives a far better crumb and is worth adding.
- The ovenNo temperature is given; the reader was assumed to know their own oven, which at this date might still have been a brick oven cooling from its peak heat. Start at 450F and drop to 400F after 15 minutes; a three-pound loaf needs a good hour and should read about 200F at the centre.
- The dough-weight tableThose allowances -- 3.5 lb of dough for a 3 lb loaf, 9 lb for an 8 lb loaf -- cover the weight lost in baking, about 14 to 15 per cent on the smaller loaves and about 11 per cent on the larger ones, so the proportion falls as the loaf gets bigger. They exist because bread was sold and reckoned by finished weight, not because the dough needs padding.
Cassell's separates "household bread" from the finer breakfast rolls and fancy breads elsewhere in the book: this is the plain everyday loaf, made in bulk in a wooden kneading-trough, with a lower-grade flour permitted and no enrichment at all. The dough-to-loaf table suggests the formula came out of trade practice -- British bread had long been regulated and sold by statutory weight, a tradition reaching back to the medieval Assize of Bread and continued by nineteenth-century bread legislation after the assize itself was abolished -- and a baker who misjudged evaporation sold short. The "cupful of good yeast" belongs to the same world: before compressed and dried yeast became reliably available, households leavened with barm begged or bought from a brewer, or kept a leaven going from batch to batch. By the time this dictionary appeared in the later nineteenth century, commercial bakeries had taken over much of urban bread-making, and a ten-pound batch at home was becoming less usual.