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YEAST CAKES (William Cobbet's recipe)
To make yeast cakes--Provide seven pounds of Indian corn meal, three and a half pounds of rye flour, three ounces of hops, and one gallon of boiling water. Separate the hops by the hand, strew and boil them in the water for half an hour, then strain the liquor into an earthen vessel, put in the rye flour while hot, stirring quickly as the fermentation commences. Next day, when it is working, put in the Indian meal, stirring it well Before all the meal is added, it will become a stiff dough. Knead it well, and roll it out as you would a pie-crust, to the thickness of half an inch. Cut it into cakes with a tumbler-glass, or anything else that will serve the purpose; place these cakes on a board, and set them in the sun to dry. Turn them every day, sheltering from wet, until they become quite hard. Keep them in a bag or box perfectly free from damp. When you bake, take a couple of these yeast cakes, break them, and put them in hot water over night. Let the vessel containing them stand near the fire: they will dissolve; use the liquid for setting your sponge (as it is called), just as you would the yeast of beer. White pea meal, or barley-flour, will do as well as Indian meal. Mr. Cobbett adds, that the very best bread he ever ate was lightened with these cakes.
This is not a cake in any modern sense: it is a dried sourdough-and-hop starter, the standard way a household kept leaven alive before packaged yeast. The quantities are on a farmhouse scale and the drying step is the whole point.
- Indian mealIndian corn meal is simply cornmeal, medium or fine grind. The recipe's own alternatives, pea meal and barley flour, work because their role is mainly to absorb moisture and carry the leaven.
- Scale it downSeven pounds of cornmeal and three and a half of rye gives well over ten pounds of dough and dozens of cakes. An eighth of the recipe -- 14 oz cornmeal, 7 oz rye flour, about 3/8 oz hops, 2 cups water -- still yields a couple of dozen cakes.
- The hinge: liquid temperature"Put in the rye flour while hot" is the one instruction to disregard. Hop water straight off the boil will scald the wild yeasts the rye flour carries. Let it drop to about 100-110F before stirring the flour in, then leave it in a warm place until it is visibly bubbling, which may take a day or two rather than overnight.
- HopsThree ounces of whole dried hop cones, separated by hand as directed. They are not for flavour; hop resins suppress unwanted bacteria and keep the starter from souring while it dries. Any bittering variety will serve.
- Earthen vesselA glazed stoneware crock or a glass bowl. Avoid unlined aluminium or cast iron, which react with an acidic ferment.
- DryingSun-drying works only in genuinely hot, dry, breezy weather; anywhere damp the cakes will mould before they harden. A dehydrator or an oven with the heat off and the light on, around 90-100F with the door ajar, dries them in a day or two. They must be hard and dry all the way through, and stored somewhere dry, or they spoil.
- Using themTwo cakes broken into warm water overnight, as the recipe directs, gives a slurry to start a sponge. Treat it as a sourdough leaven, not as commercial yeast: expect several hours of rise rather than one, and test the batch on a single loaf before committing a day's baking to it.
William Cobbett was the English farmer, pamphleteer and political journalist whose Cottage Economy (1821-22) set out to teach labouring families to brew, bake and cure for themselves rather than buy. He had spent about two years farming on Long Island, and some of the practical advice he brought home was American in origin -- this recipe, built on cornmeal and hop water, may be a case in point, since hop-raised yeast cakes were a common domestic leaven in rural America, though in Britain brewer's barm was the more usual leaven, before compressed baker's yeast became cheap and widely sold in the later nineteenth century. Cassell's, reprinting it decades later, is preserving a technique its readers no longer needed: by then yeast came from the grocer. The method survives in kitchen memory as "hop yeast" bread, and the underlying idea -- dry your leaven hard so it keeps, then wake it in warm water -- is the same one behind a dried sourdough culture today.