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YEAST, PRESERVED (another way) (Take a close canvas bag fill)
Take a close canvas bag, fill it with yeast, then press out the water and make the yeast into cakes. "I have tasted bread," says one writer, "made with yeast preserved in this manner, and it has been excellent. The mode of using it is to dilute it with warm water, to which a little sugar and flour are added."
This is a method for keeping brewer's barm — the live, foaming yeast skimmed off fermenting ale — at a time when no packaged yeast existed. It works, but the assumptions behind it need spelling out.
- What the yeast is"Yeast" here means liquid barm from a brewery or from a home-brewed ale or beer, not a dry granulated product. Nothing sold in a supermarket today needs this treatment; a modern equivalent would be the thick slurry from the bottom of a fermenter or a very wet sourdough starter.
- The canvas bagA close-woven, unbleached cotton or linen bag acts as a filter press: the liquid runs out, the yeast solids stay behind. A jelly bag or a doubled square of butter muslin under a weighted plate does the same job. The aim is a stiff paste, not a dry crumb.
- Dry them, and dry them coolThe original stops at "cakes," though the cakes would need to air-dry thoroughly in a cool, well-ventilated place. Yeast is killed by heat well below oven temperature, so no oven and no sunny windowsill. Cakes still damp in the middle will mould rather than keep.
- Keeping timeEven well-dried barm cakes lose vigour steadily, and are best reckoned in weeks rather than months. Kept in a sealed jar in the refrigerator they will last longer than the period's larder would have allowed, and any cake showing coloured mould or a sour, cheesy smell should be discarded rather than diluted.
- Reviving the cakeWarm water means blood-warm, about 100 to 110F. Crumble the cake in, add the sugar and flour, and leave it 20 to 30 minutes: a good head of foam is the test that the yeast survived. If nothing happens in half an hour, the cake has probably lost its vigour and the dough will not rise.
- Quantities are not givenThe recipe offers no weights at all, and there is no honest conversion between a homemade barm cake and a modern sachet. Judge strength by the foam test and by how fast the sponge rises, and be prepared for a much longer proof than a commercial yeast would need.
Before compressed and dried yeasts were sold commercially in the later nineteenth century, the domestic baker's leaven came from the brewer: barm, the living froth skimmed from fermenting beer, bought or begged fresh and used within a day or two. Its supply was erratic and its quality worse, which is why cookery books of the period carry whole clusters of entries on preserving, sweetening and reviving yeast — this being one of several "another way" variants printed in sequence. Pressing barm into cakes and drying them was one household answer to the same problem that manufacturers later solved by standardising and selling yeast. The anonymous "one writer" quoted is characteristic of Victorian compilations, which often carried testimony from earlier household manuals and agricultural journals with only the vaguest attribution.