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YEAST, CONNECTICUT (an American recipe)
Put a handful of hops in a bag, boil in two quarts of water with five pared potatoes; when done, sift the potatoes, put with them in a pan one table-spoonful of flour, half a cupful of sugar, half a cupful of salt, and pour on this the boiling hop-water. When sufficiently cool, add yeast enough to ferment it well, then put it in a jar, cork tight, and keep in a cool place.
This is a barm — a liquid bread leaven kept alive in a jar, from the era before compressed or dried yeast was reliably sold. It behaves like a very wet sourdough starter that has been given a boiled potato-and-sugar feed and a dose of hops as a preservative.
- The hinge: cool it properly"When sufficiently cool" means below about 100F before the seed yeast goes in. Hop water straight off the boil will kill the culture outright, and this is the single step that decides whether the jar ferments or spoils.
- HopsA handful is roughly half an ounce of dried whole cones, available from brewing suppliers. They are here for their antibacterial resins as much as for flavour — they suppress the lactic bacteria that would otherwise sour the jar.
- Five pared potatoesAssume medium floury potatoes, about 1.5 lb total peeled. "Sift" means to press them through a sieve or ricer into a smooth purée, not to sift dry flour.
- The salt is unusually highHalf a cupful of salt to two quarts is far more than fermentation tolerates comfortably. Treat the quantity as doubtful, possibly a misprint for a much smaller measure; a heavily salted barm will ferment sluggishly if at all.
- "Yeast enough"This would have meant a quantity of an existing barm, the amount left to the cook's judgement. A modern equivalent is a teaspoon of active dry yeast slaked in warm water, or a cup of lively sourdough starter, after which the jar keeps itself going as long as it is fed and used.
- Cork tight, with careA sealed vessel of actively fermenting liquid builds pressure and can burst. Let it work uncovered in a warm room for eight to twelve hours until foaming subsides, then cover loosely and refrigerate rather than corking hard.
- Yield and useSomething under two quarts of barm after boiling, enough to raise a great many loaves. Reckon roughly half a cup in place of a packet of yeast, reducing the other liquid in the dough by the same amount, and expect a slower, tangier rise. Keeps a week or two cold; discard if it smells of acetone or shows coloured mould.
Home-made yeasts fill several columns in nineteenth-century cookbooks because dependable commercial yeast was a late arrival: bakers and brewers sold surplus barm, but a household without a brewery nearby had to keep its own culture alive from week to week. Hops were the usual insurance, their bitter resins discouraging the bacteria that turn a jar of leaven sour or ropy, and the boiled potato supplied the starch to keep the yeast fed. The receipt is printed here as "an American recipe" -- regional names of this kind were common shorthand in the period for slight variations on the same potato-and-hop formula, and such receipts circulated widely in American manuals through much of the century. Compressed fresh yeast, sold in cakes from the later part of that century, gradually made such jars unnecessary.