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Rye Bread
Late in the evening, pour a quart of warm water into a large bowl, and stir into this as much flour as will make a smooth batter, and half a pint of yeast. Cover the bowl with a cloth, set it in a warm place, and let the sponge rise. In the morning, put into another bowl three pounds and a half of rye-flour. Scoop a hollow in the centre, pour in the sponge, add a spoonful of salt and a tea-spoonful of baking-powder, and knead the dough thoroughly till it no longer sticks to the bowl and the hands. In kneading it, add a little more warm water if necessary. Cover the bowl, and let the dough rise for three hours, or till it is light; make it up into loaves, and bake these in a quick oven. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour to one hour, according to the size of the loaves.
A two-stage overnight sponge, written when yeast came as a liquid barm rather than a sachet. The measurements are generous but workable; the yeast quantity is the one line that needs rethinking.
- Half a pint of yeastThis means liquid brewer's yeast or barm from a previous baking, much weaker and wetter than modern dried yeast. Around 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast, or a 7 g sachet, is a reasonable substitute in the overnight sponge; dropping the barm leaves the dough short of that liquid, which the recipe's own instruction to add more warm water covers.
- A quart of warm waterAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.1 litres. With the unspecified sponge flour plus 3 lb 8 oz (1.59 kg) of rye, this is a large batch: the dough will come to well over 3 kg, enough for four good-sized loaves.
- The unmeasured sponge flour"as much flour as will make a smooth batter" is genuinely open. Aim for the consistency of thick pancake batter, which with this much water takes a good deal of flour, upwards of 800 g. The recipe says only "flour", which in a book of this kind would normally mean wheat, and that wheat contributes much of the loaf's lift.
- Rye needs the wheatRye has little gluten, so the dough will never behave like a wheat dough. It stays tacky and dense; knead to smoothness rather than to a windowpane, and resist adding flour past the point where it stops clinging.
- A quick ovenUsually read as somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C). Rye benefits from a hot start; steam the oven for the first ten minutes if you can, then bake the stated 45 minutes to an hour. A loaf is done at an internal temperature of about 205F (96C).
- The baking powderA teaspoon in this quantity of dough will do very little. It may have been intended as insurance against unreliable barm, though the recipe does not say so; with modern yeast it can probably be omitted.
- Rising timesThree hours for the second rise suits a kitchen cooler than most modern rooms; check at 90 minutes. Rye is generally reckoned to overproof more readily than wheat.
- CoolingRye crumb sets as it cools and is gummy if cut warm. Leave the loaves at least four hours, ideally overnight, before slicing.
Rye was the everyday bread grain across northern and eastern Europe long before wheat became cheap, because it tolerates poor soil, short summers and wet ground where wheat fails. In Britain it had largely retreated to the status of a specialty or a health loaf by the time Cassell's was compiled. The overnight sponge itself is the older method: before packaged yeast, a baker kept a portion of liquid barm from brewing or from the previous batch and gave it a night to multiply in a warm corner. The result here is a mild, soft-crumbed rye rather than the dense sour ryes of Germany and the Baltic, which are generally traced to long-fermented sourdough starters rather than barm.