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First Prize at County Fair (Makes 8 Loaves)
YEAST 1 cup Five Roses flour scalded with potato water at noon, and add 3 mashed potatoes. When cold, add 14 cakes of Royal Yeast previously soaked in½ cup water, and set to rise in a warm place until bedtime.
BREAD Strain the above through a sieve into a bread pan, and add 2 tablespoons salt, ½ 1/2 cup sugar, 4 quarts lukewarm water and enough Five Roses flour to make a stiff batter. Beat smoothly with spoon, and set to rise overnight in a warm place. In the morning, add enough flour to make stiff enough to knead on board. Set to rise again until light. Then mould into loaves, and let rise until light and up to top of pan. Bake 1 hour in steady oven. -Mary Hammond, Essex, Ont.
A full-day, eight-loaf farm bake built on a homemade potato yeast. The quantities are for a household that baked once a week; the method itself is sound but the scale and the yeast measurement both need attention before you start.
- The yeast quantity is unreliable as printed"14 cakes of Royal Yeast" is most likely a typesetting error for a fraction; Royal Yeast Cakes were sold as dry cakes, and fourteen would be far more than eight loaves needs. Treat the figure as unusable and use one packet (2 1/4 tsp) of active dry yeast for the potato sponge.
- Scale it downFour quarts of water plus the sponge will absorb roughly 14 to 16 lb of flour and yield eight large loaves. Quartering the whole thing — 1 quart water, 1/2 tbsp salt, 2 tbsp sugar, one potato — gives two loaves and fits a domestic mixing bowl.
- Potato waterThis is the starchy water the potatoes were boiled in, poured hot over the flour to scald it. The starch feeds the yeast and the potato keeps the crumb moist and the loaf fresh longer; do not substitute plain water if you want the effect the recipe is after.
- "Bread pan" means the mixing vesselIn 1913 the bread pan was the large tin or earthenware basin the dough was mixed and raised in, not a loaf tin. Loaf tins appear later, at "mould into loaves."
- "Steady oven" and one hourThe recipe gives no temperature; for bread of this size somewhere around 375-400F, held without falling, is a reasonable reading. One hour suits a large loaf; go by an internal temperature of 195-200F and a hollow sound when the base is tapped rather than the clock, since modern tins are smaller and bake faster.
- "Until light"Light means roughly doubled and holding a fingerprint when pressed. The overnight batter rise and both dough rises should each reach that point; timings will run shorter than 1913 in a centrally heated kitchen.
- The timetableSponge at noon, yeast added when cold, batter set to rise overnight, kneaded and baked next morning — about 20 hours start to finish. Plan the day around it rather than trying to compress it.
- Straining the spongePushing the potato sponge through a sieve breaks up any lumps of mashed potato that would otherwise show as dense patches in the crumb. Do not skip it.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to sell Five Roses flour, and much of it came from Canadian home cooks who mailed in their own recipes — hence the attribution to Mary Hammond of Essex, Ontario, and the title's claim of a county fair prize. Bread was the classic fair competition class, and a first prize was a genuine local reputation. The potato-and-flour sponge here belongs to an older tradition of keeping your own yeast alive at home; commercial yeast cakes like Royal's were sold as a direct leaven, and by the 1920s reliable packaged yeast had made the noon-to-morning potato ferment optional.