Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Bread Without Yeast
To every half-quartern of flour add one tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda and half a tea-spoonful of salt. Mix all together; then to the water, sufficient to make a dough, add half a tea-spoonful of muriatic acid. Set into the oven at once. This makes delicious and wholesome bread. Some use tartaric acid; in which case the bread will contain tartrate of soda, which, although not poisonous, is medicinal, being slightly purgative. On the other hand, muriatic acid neutralises soda just as well as tartaric acid, and the resulting compound is only common salt.
This is a chemically leavened bread from the decades when bakers were still arguing about how to raise a loaf without brewer's yeast. The acid it calls for is the reason it cannot be made.
- Muriatic acid is hydrochloric acidIt is a corrosive mineral acid, and the muriatic acid sold today is a hardware-store product intended for masonry and pool water. It is not food grade and is not manufactured to any purity standard for ingestion; technical-grade acid can carry iron and other metallic impurities from its industrial feedstock.
- The neutralisation is unmeasurableThe chemistry the author describes is real as far as it goes: hydrochloric acid plus sodium bicarbonate gives sodium chloride, water and carbon dioxide. But commercial muriatic acid runs anywhere from about 10 to 31 per cent strength, so "half a tea-spoonful" against one teaspoon of soda cannot be balanced. Get it wrong in the acid's favour and free hydrochloric acid goes into the dough.
- Handling hazard before it ever reaches the ovenConcentrated hydrochloric acid fumes attack the eyes and airway and burn skin on contact. Adding it to the mixing water in a domestic kitchen, in a teaspoon, is not a safe operation regardless of what happens to the loaf.
- The tartaric acid asideThe author's dismissal of tartaric acid as "slightly purgative" reflects the real reputation of sodium tartrate, but this is the branch of the argument that led somewhere useful. Modern baking powder is the descendant of the cream-of-tartar-and-soda approach, buffered and measured so the balance is fixed for you.
- The flour quantity is unclearA quartern in bread work is usually read as a quarter of a peck of flour, roughly 3 to 3.5 lb, so a half-quartern is somewhere near 1.75 lb. Period usage is inconsistent, and the recipe gives no water quantity at all.
- If you want yeastless breadUse a current soda bread or quick bread recipe, where the acid comes from buttermilk, cream of tartar or a commercial baking powder. Do not attempt a substitution inside this formula.
Chemical leavening was a nineteenth-century preoccupation. Yeast was unreliable, sourdough was slow, and a run of chemists and physicians proposed acid-plus-alkali systems that would raise a loaf on demand — most famously the cream of tartar and bicarbonate pairings that became commercial baking powder, but also, in print if less often in practice, mineral acids. The argument reproduced here is a period one: soda alone leaves a soapy, yellowish crumb, so something must be added to consume it, and the writer prefers hydrochloric acid precisely because the residue is nothing but table salt, whereas tartaric acid leaves a tartrate salt with a laxative reputation. The logic is sound; what it ignores is the purity of the acid, which in an era before food-grade standards was whatever the local druggist had on the shelf. It is best read as an explanation of leavening chemistry rather than as a formula.