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Yeast, Bread Without
"Some years since," says Miss Acton, in her "Bread-book," "when unfermented bread was first becoming known, I had it tried very successfully in the following manner, and I have since been told that an almost similar method of preparing it is common in many parts both of England and Ireland, where it is almost impossible to procure a constant supply of yeast. Blend well together a tea-spoonful of pounded sugar and fifty grains of the purest carbonate of soda; mix a salt-spoonful of salt with a pound of flour, and rub the soda and sugar through a hair sieve into it. Stir and mingle them well, and make them quickly into a firm but not hard dough with some buttermilk. Bake the loaf well in a thoroughly-heated but not fierce oven. In a brick or good iron oven a few minutes less than an hour would be sufficient to bake a loaf of ordinary weight. The butter-milk should be kept till it is quite acid, but it must never be in the slightest degree rancid or otherwise bad. All unfermented bread should be placed in the oven directly it is made, or it will be heavy. For a large baking allow rather less than an ounce of soda to the gallon (seven pounds) of flour."
A pound-of-flour soda loaf from Eliza Acton, quoted in Cassell's. The measurements are apothecary-precise in places and silent in others.
- Get it into the oven at onceThis is the hinge. The soda begins reacting with the acid in the buttermilk the moment they meet, and a dough left standing will have spent its lift before it sees heat. Have the oven fully up to temperature before you mix.
- Fifty grains of sodaAn apothecaries' grain is about 65 mg, so fifty grains is roughly 3.2 g, or a scant 3/4 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Acton's larger-scale figure is in the same range but a shade more generous: rather less than an ounce to seven pounds of flour comes to something under 4 g per pound.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon held about a quarter teaspoon. "Carbonate of soda" here is sodium bicarbonate, our baking soda, not the harsher washing soda (sodium carbonate) sometimes sold under similar names.
- The flour and the missing liquidA pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups. Acton gives no quantity of buttermilk because the dough is made by feel; expect somewhere near 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups to reach a firm, just-cohesive dough.
- Buttermilk has changedActon meant the sour liquid left from churning butter, kept until sharply acid. Modern cultured buttermilk is milder and thicker. If yours tastes flat, a tablespoon of lemon juice stirred in will bring the acidity closer to what the soda needs.
- Sieving the sodaRubbing the soda and sugar through a fine sieve into the flour is not fussiness. Undispersed lumps of bicarbonate leave bitter yellow-brown spots in the crumb, and there is no kneading here to distribute them.
- Oven heatActon gives no temperature; "thoroughly heated but not fierce" is usually read as somewhere around 400-425F. Her near-hour reflects the falling heat of a brick oven; in a modern one a one-pound round loaf is likely done in 35-45 minutes, when it sounds hollow underneath and reads about 200F inside.
- Shaping and yieldAbout one small loaf, four to six servings. The recipe specifies neither shape nor scoring, but a deep cross cut in the top before baking is the usual way to help a dense dough open; handle it as little as possible -- this is not a dough to knead smooth.
Eliza Acton set out this method in The English Bread-Book (1857), written late in her career after the success of Modern Cookery for Private Families. "Unfermented bread" was a live question in the 1840s and 50s: bicarbonate of soda had become cheap and reliably pure, chemists and reformers were promoting chemically raised loaves as cleaner and quicker than yeast, and John Dauglish's aerated bread process arrived in the same decade. Acton, characteristically, notes that country households in England and Ireland had been doing much the same thing for years wherever yeast was hard to keep ththe buttermilk-and-soda loaf that later became known simply as Irish soda bread.