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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Unfermented Bread
Fermented bread is sometimes considered unwholesome. Those who are of this opinion may make their bread as follows. Mix one ounce of bicarbonate of soda with eight pounds of flour. Stir one ounce of hydrochloric acid with four pints of warm water. Stir the liquor into the flour briskly, with a wooden spoon, till the ingredients are thoroughly blended; divide the dough into loaves, and bake these immediately in a brisk oven. It will need to bake as long as bread usually does.
This is a genuine bread formula, but its leavening depends on a technical-grade mineral acid that has no place in a kitchen. The points below explain where it fails rather than how to adapt it.
- Hydrochloric acid is not a food ingredientThe "hydrochloric acid" of the household shops was muriatic acid, sold concentrated for cleaning brick and metal; modern hardware grades run about 28-32 per cent, and commercial strengths in the period varied. It burns skin, eyes and the respiratory tract on contact and gives off choking fumes. A food-grade hydrochloric acid does exist as an industrial processing aid, but nothing sold for household cleaning is purified or labelled for consumption.
- The neutralisation is not reliableThe chemistry the recipe depends on is sound in principle — acid plus bicarbonate of soda yields carbon dioxide, water and common salt — but only if the two are matched exactly. An ounce of bicarbonate needs a precisely known weight of pure acid to be consumed entirely, and the strength of commercially sold acid was not dependable. Whatever is in excess, acid or soda, remains in the dough.
- Impurities in commercial acidNineteenth-century muriatic acid was a by-product of the alkali industry and routinely carried iron, and in some samples arsenic, from the sulphuric acid used to make it. Arsenical contamination of commercial acids and of the chemical leaveners derived from them was a recognised public-health complaint of the period.
- Handling risk before it ever reaches the doughStirring concentrated acid into four pints of warm water in an ordinary domestic vessel is a hazardous step in itself: splashes and choking vapour follow, and the dilution gives off some heat. This is a hazard of making the recipe, quite apart from eating the result.
- No modern substitution is offeredThe effect the recipe is reaching for — a fast, unyeasted loaf raised by an acid-base reaction — is achieved today with cream of tartar, buttermilk or a commercial baking powder in a soda bread or quick bread. Use a current recipe for one of those rather than attempting to rescale this one.
Unfermented or "aerated" bread belongs to a mid-Victorian conviction that yeast fermentation was wasteful and faintly unclean: it consumed part of the flour's starch, and to some minds it associated the daily loaf with putrefaction and with the adulterated barm sold to bakers. Justus von Liebig's writings on chemical leavening are often invoked as lending the idea scientific weight, though the domestic vogue in Britain was promoted more directly by medical advocates, and it was taken up commercially by a company which, founded in London in the early 1860s on Dauglish's process for forcing carbonic acid gas into dough under pressure, grew into the ABC chain of teashops. The domestic version printed here is the cheap cousin of that process, generating the same gas in the mixing bowl from soda and acid, with the comforting argument that the residue is only table salt. Cassell's presents it without enthusiasm, prefacing it with "those who are of this opinion," which reads as a compiler recording a fashion rather than recommending it; packaged baking powders, already on sale from the 1840s, would in time make the acid bottle unnecessary.