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Wheat and Maize Bread
Mix seven pounds of Indian meal with double its weight in wheaten flour, and add four ounces of salt. Mix a pint and a half of fresh yeast with two quarts of boiling water. Make a hollow in the flour without touching the bottom of the bowl, pour in the yeast, and stir into it as much flour as will make a thin batter. Sprinkle flour lightly on the surface of the batter, cover the bowl, and leave it on the hearth for an hour. Stir into it two additional quarts of boiling water, cover it again, and let it stand in a warm place for ten hours. Knead thoroughly, gash the surface with a knife, and let the dough rise for a couple of hours longer till it is very light. Form into loaves, put these into tins, let them rise for half an hour longer, and bake in a good oven. If the crust is hard, wrap the loaves in a towel as soon as they are taken from the oven. Bread made in this way is inexpensive and wholesome. It has a peculiar flavour, which improves with acquaintance.
A bakehouse-scale formula: 21 lb of combined meal and flour, enough for a dozen or more loaves. Scaling to a tenth gives a manageable two-loaf batch, and one instruction needs correcting before anything else.
- The boiling water and the yeastMixed literally, a pint and a half of yeast in two quarts of boiling water is dead yeast. "Boiling water" is probably loose for water that has been boiled and left to cool, or the hot water was meant to soften the meal before the yeast went in. Either way, let any water that touches yeast fall to blood heat (about 100F) first.
- Indian mealCornmeal, and in this period a fairly coarse stone-ground yellow or white meal rather than the fine degerminated product. It contributes no gluten, which is why it is carried by twice its weight of wheat flour.
- Fresh yeastA pint and a half, measured by volume, means a liquid yeast (barm or a home-brewed ferment) rather than compressed cake yeast. For a tenth-scale batch of about 2 lb flour, roughly 1 to 1.5 teaspoons of instant dried yeast is ample given the very long fermentation.
- SaltFour ounces to 21 lb of flour is about 1.2 per cent, low by modern taste. Around 2 per cent of the total flour weight is standard now, and the bread will taste flat without it.
- The ten-hour standThis is an overnight sponge, judged for a cool Victorian kitchen. In a 70F modern room it will be ready sooner and can over-ferment into sourness; check it at six to eight hours, or hold it cooler.
- Gashing the doughThe recipe gives no reason for cutting the surface after kneading; cutting dough at this stage was common practice, and may have served as a way to watch how the dough recovered.
- A good ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a workable modern equivalent is around 425F to start, dropping to 400F. Large loaves want 45 to 60 minutes; the crumb is set at an internal temperature of about 200F. Tent with foil if the top darkens early.
- The towelWrapping hot loaves traps escaping steam and softens the crust. Useful with a coarse, heavy loaf like this one; skip it if you want the crust to stay crisp.
- YieldAt full scale, a very large batch: on the order of fifteen to twenty loaves of about 1.5 lb, depending on how much extra water the meal takes. The bread is dense and close-grained.
"Indian meal" is the older British and colonial name for maize meal, distinguishing New World corn from the "corn" that in England meant grain generally, chiefly wheat. Mixed-grain loaves of this kind belong to a long tradition of stretching costly wheat flour with cheaper meal, and cornmeal became a common extender in Britain after large-scale American maize imports arrived in the nineteenth century, most conspicuously during the Irish famine relief effort of the 1840s. Because maize has no gluten, it can never carry a raised loaf alone, hence the two-to-one wheat ratio and the long sponge, which gives the coarse meal time to hydrate fully. The frank closing line "a peculiar flavour, which improves with acquaintance" tells you exactly how the recipe was pitched: economical household bread, recommended for the price and the wholesomeness rather than the pleasure.