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Yeast, Home-Made
No. 1. Boil two ounces of best hops in two quarts of water for half an hour. Strain the liquor, and let it cool down to the heat of new milk. Put into it a small handful of salt and half a pound of moist sugar. Beat up a pound of fine flour with some of the liquor, and mix all well together. Two days afterwards add three pounds of potatoes which have been boiled and mashed. Let the preparation stand for twenty-four hours, then strain it, and bottle for use, but do not cork it till it has ceased working. Whilst making it, stir frequently and keep it near the fire. Before using, shake the bottle well. It will keep in a cool place for two months. Yeast made from this recipe is excellent, but it must be prepared with great care. Bread made from it needs to rise longer, both in the sponge and in the dough, than when fresh brewer's yeast is used. No. 2. Put two gallons of cold water into a stewpan, with a quarter of a pound of moist sugar and one ounce of salt. Put it on the fire, and as it beats, stir in with it one pound of flour. Let it boil for an hour. Pour it out, and when milk-warm bottle it closely. It will be fit for use in twenty-four hours. Half a pint of this yeast will make nine pounds of bread. No. 3. Put a handful of hops into a quart of water, either hot or cold; let them boil for twenty minutes. Mix in a bowl two table-spoonfuls of flour with one table-spoonful of salt and one of moist sugar. Pour the boiling liquor through a sieve upon the mixture, and stir briskly. When it is almost cold, stir into it a tea-cupful of good brewer's yeast. Let it stand in a cool place for twenty-four hours or more, and bottle for use. In winter-time this yeast should be kept in a warm place. It should be stirred before being used. It should stand to sponge all night, and will then require to rise about two hours after being kneaded. When a fresh supply is to be made, a pint of this preparation may be used instead of a tea-cupful of fresh yeast. A large tea-cupful of this yeast will raise fourteen pounds of flour.
Three ways of keeping a live leaven in a house with no packet yeast. They work, but they behave nothing like modern dried yeast, and the vocabulary needs translating.
- The instruction that matters"Do not cork it till it has ceased working" is the whole safety of the thing. A bottle of actively fermenting liquid sealed tight builds real pressure and can burst; leave it loosely covered until bubbling has stopped, and store it in a container that vents.
- "Heat of new milk" and "milk-warm"Both mean blood heat, roughly 95-100F. Yeast begins to suffer much above that and is killed at around 130-140F, which is why the hop liquor must be cooled before the ferment is pitched or the flour paste inoculated.
- Moist sugarUnrefined or partly refined soft sugar, closest to today's light brown or muscovado. Ordinary granulated sugar works for the ferment; the small difference is in colour and a trace of molasses flavour.
- HopsTwo ounces of dried hops is a large amount by modern brewing standards and will make a markedly bitter liquor. The hops are there as a preservative as much as a flavouring, discouraging spoilage bacteria over the two months the recipe claims for keeping.
- Brewer's yeastNo. 3 depends on a teacupful of fresh liquid barm from a brewery, which is not a supermarket item. Live yeast slurry from a craft brewery, or fresh compressed baker's yeast, is the nearest substitute; dried yeast rehydrated in warm water will also start it, though the character differs.
- No. 2 has no starter at allThe boiled sugar-salt-flour water is bottled with nothing added to it, so any fermentation must come from whatever wild organisms are in the flour, the vessel or the air, and the instruction to "bottle it closely" works against that. Results are unpredictable and it may sour or spoil rather than raise bread. Treat it as a curiosity rather than a working method.
- Sponge and dough"Sponge" is the slack preliminary batter set overnight; the dough is mixed and kneaded from it the next morning. The note that this yeast needs longer than brewer's yeast is accurate, as these home barms are weaker and less consistent in cell count.
- YieldsNo. 1 begins with two quarts of water, but boiling, the added flour and potatoes and the final straining make the finished volume uncertain. No. 2 claims half a pint per nine pounds of bread; No. 3, a large teacupful per fourteen pounds of flour. By comparison, modern practice uses far less leaven relative to flour and far shorter timings.
- Storage"a cool place" in a nineteenth-century house meant a larder at perhaps 50-55F. In a modern refrigerator the ferment will keep longer but work more slowly, and needs bringing to room temperature and shaking before use.
Cassell's belongs to a generation of cookery books that still had to teach a household how to obtain yeast at all. Until reliable compressed and, later, dried yeast reached shops, bakers and home cooks bought or begged barm, the living froth skimmed from fermenting beer, from a brewery; when no brewery was near, or when its barm was too bitter or too stale, you grew your own. Hop-and-potato yeasts of this kind appear across British and American domestic manuals through the nineteenth century, the hops valued for their preservative bitterness and the potato for the starch that keeps the ferment fed. The book's own warning that such yeast "must be prepared with great care" and that bread from it needs longer rising is an honest account of the trade-off: a home barm is variable in strength, and the baker compensated with time. Reliable manufactured yeast, generally dated to the second half of the century, is what made recipes like these disappear from later editions of the household dictionaries.