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Yeast, Brewer's, to Prepare for Use
Taste the yeast, and if it is very bitter, pour over it a considerable quantity of cold water. Let it stand for twenty-four hours, then pour off the water, when the yeast will be found at the bottom of the vessel quite thick. Taste it again. If it still continues bitter, pour more water over it, and let it stand an hour or two longer. Yeast may be kept covered with cold water for several days. When brewer's yeast does not appear sufficiently strong, honey or brown sugar may be mixed with it, in the proportion of a tea-spoonful to half a pint. Sufficient: half a pint of solid brewer's yeast will raise fourteen pounds of flour. If it is thin, a few spoonfuls more will be required.
This is an ingredient preparation rather than a dish: it turns a bucket of brewery yeast slurry into something usable as bread leaven. Almost none of it applies to a packet of dried yeast, but the logic behind it is worth understanding.
- Why it is bitterBrewer's yeast is skimmed or drawn off from hopped wort, and the cells carry hop resins with them. That bitterness transfers straight into bread, which is the only reason for the repeated washing described here.
- What washing actually doesCold water lets the yeast settle out while the soluble bitter compounds and spent beer are poured away. Expect a pale, putty-thick sediment at the bottom and cloudy liquid on top; the liquid is what you discard.
- Storage"Kept covered with cold water for several days" assumes a cold larder or cellar. Washed yeast slurry held at room temperature sours and loses vigour quickly; brewers today keep it refrigerated and use it within a week or two.
- Half a pint of solid yeast"Solid" means the settled, spoonable sediment, not the watery skimmings. An imperial half-pint of it weighs on the order of 10 oz, which is a very generous pitch by modern baking standards.
- Fourteen pounds of flourThat is a full domestic bread-day batch, anywhere from four quartern loaves to around ten smaller ones depending on the size baked. For comparison, 14 lb of flour today would take around 1.5 to 2 oz of fresh compressed yeast, or about 2 tablespoons of instant dried yeast, with a long rise.
- The honey or sugar testA teaspoonful of honey or brown sugar per half pint gives the cells something to feed on; the recipe presents this as a way of strengthening weak yeast rather than as a test of it. The nearest modern practice is proofing dried yeast in warm sweetened water.
Before packaged yeast, British households that baked their own bread leavened it with barm — the yeast head skimmed from ale fermentation — bought from a local brewer or publican, or begged from a neighbour who baked that day. Its quality varied with whoever had brewed it, hence a dictionary entry devoted entirely to tasting, washing and testing the stuff before trusting it with a week's flour. The bitterness of hopped barm is one reason compressed and dried yeasts, industrially grown on molasses rather than harvested from a brewery, took over domestic baking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cassell's sits right on that hinge: the instruction assumes brewer's yeast is what a cook will have, while later editions of household manuals increasingly assume a purchased cake of German or compressed yeast instead.