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Yeast, Kirkleatham
Boil an ounce of hops in two quarts of water for twenty minutes. Strain the liquor, and mix with it a quarter of a pound of flour and a little less than a quarter of a pint of fresh yeast. Bottle the preparation, and tie the cork down. When the bread is to be made, add mashed potatoes, according to the quantity of yeast required. For a peck of flour boil and mash three pounds of potatoes, and mix with them half a pound of flour and half a pint of the yeast. Let the mixture stand all day. Mix it with the flour, and let it stand to sponge all night; knead and bake next day. Time, twenty minutes to boil the hops in the water. Sufficient, half a pint for about a peck of flour.
This is not a bread recipe but a yeast recipe: a hopped, potato-fed leaven kept in bottle and refreshed when baking day came round. It works, but almost every quantity is in pre-metric British domestic measure and one instruction is genuinely hazardous by modern standards.
- Do not tie the cork downAn actively fermenting hop yeast produces carbon dioxide steadily, and a sealed bottle with a corked and tied stopper is a pressure vessel. Ferment and store it in a jar with a loose lid, a cloth cover or an airlock; the Victorian instruction assumed thick glass, cool cellars and a tolerance for breakage that no one needs today.
- A peck of flourA peck is a dry measure of two gallons; for flour it was reckoned at roughly 12 to 14 lb, which is four to six large loaves. Scale down proportionally: about half a pint of the yeast, 3 lb potatoes and 8 oz flour serve that whole peck, so a single 1 kg loaf needs only a small fraction.
- Pints and quartsThese are imperial: a pint is 20 fl oz, a quart 40 fl oz. Two quarts of water is therefore about 2.3 litres, and "a little less than a quarter of a pint" of yeast is a little under 5 fl oz, roughly 130 ml.
- Fresh yeastThe starting yeast meant compressed yeast or brewers' barm. Fresh cake yeast is still available from some bakeries; the quantity of thick barm called for here is only loosely comparable to any given weight of modern fresh yeast, since barm varies in strength. Dried yeast will start the culture but the character of the result depends on how it is subsequently fed.
- Why the hopsHops are mildly antiseptic as well as bitter, and boiling them for twenty minutes gives a liquor that discourages the lactic bacteria and moulds that would otherwise sour a home leaven kept for weeks. One ounce is about 28 g; whole leaf or pellets both work.
- The potato feedBoiled mashed potato supplies starch already gelatinised and easy for yeast to attack, plus potassium and a little sugar. Mash it smooth and let it cool to blood heat before combining, or the heat will kill the culture.
- Timings and temperature"Stand all day" is roughly eight to twelve hours; the recipe gives no temperature, but somewhere warm, until the mixture is visibly frothy and smells sharply of beer, is the usual reading. The overnight sponge is a second, longer stage on the full flour; between them they do the work modern recipes get from commercial yeast in two hours.
- Keeping itHop yeast holds perhaps a week or two in a cold larder, less in a warm kitchen; refrigerated and fed it will last longer. If it smells of nail varnish or cheese rather than beer, discard it and start again.
Kirkleatham is a village near Redcar in North Yorkshire, and the name here most likely attaches the receipt to a household rather than a place of origin, in the way Victorian cookery books collected "Bath", "Ashburton" or "Kirkleatham" versions of a common preparation from correspondents and country-house kitchens. Before compressed yeast became reliably purchasable in the later nineteenth century, a household that baked its own bread had to keep its own leaven, and two methods commonly described were begging barm from a brewer or maintaining a hop-and-potato yeast like this one. The hop decoction was the preservative that made the difference: it let a cook bottle her yeast and draw on it for some time instead of starting fresh each week.