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Homesteader's Prize Bread
Put a cup of loose hops in a muslin bag and boil them in 3 quarts of water for a few minutes. Have ready 1 quart of hot mashed potatoes. Add 1 cup of Five Roses flour, ½ cup sugar and 1 tablespoon salt.
Over the latter mixture pour the boiling hop water. Add 2 cakes of yeast while it is warm and set in a warm place to rise.
Take 2 cups of mashed potatoes, 1 cup Five Roses flour, 1 cup hop yeast, and 1 cup warm water. Put in an 8 quart pail with a cover and mix well into a batter.
Then add 4 more cups of warm water.
Beat again to thoroughly incorporate the yeast with the mixture. Then add enough flour to make a stiff batter. Cover up and set in a warm place overnight.
In the morning, sift 2 quarts of Five Roses flour in bread dish and take the cold chill out of it. Put in a handful of salt. Pour in the sponge and stiffen with flour a little and get it on the bread board as soon as possible, thoroughly mixing in a little flour at a time until it does not stick to the hands or board, which will require the better part of an hour. Roll with the heel of the hand, turning the right hand side farthest away from you-this is the best mixing process. Mould into loaves, bake.--Thomas Orr, Beaver Creek, B.C.
This is really two recipes stacked: a hop-water potato yeast (a barm), and then a very large batch of bread raised with it. Read it through twice before starting, because the second paragraph quietly begins a new mixture and only uses a cup of the first.
- The hinge: the hop water must not kill the yeastThe boiling hop liquid is poured over the potato-flour-sugar mixture, and the yeast cakes go in only "while it is warm." Let the mash drop to about 100F before adding yeast; poured on too hot it is a dead start and the whole two-day sequence fails.
- What the hops are forHops contribute mild antibacterial resins that keep a wet potato barm from souring, plus bitterness against the sweetness of the potato. Use whole dried leaf hops from a brewing supplier and measure by volume as the recipe does; a loose cup of whole cones weighs well under an ounce. Pellets, which crumble to powder, may pass through a loose muslin bag. A low-alpha variety is the likelier match for a farm garden's hops, though the recipe does not say.
- Yeast cakesTwo cakes most likely means two compressed cakes of about 0.6 oz each, though 'cakes of yeast' in this period could also mean the dried yeast cakes then on sale. Taking it as compressed yeast, substitute roughly 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon of active dry yeast, or about 1¼ oz fresh cake yeast. Only 1 cup of the finished hop yeast goes into the bread; the surplus will keep refrigerated for a few days and can be used to seed the next baking.
- Mashed potatoesPlain mashed, no butter, milk or seasoning beyond the salt called for; about 2 lb of peeled russets gives a quart. Save the potato cooking water and use it for the "warm water" in the batter.
- "A handful of salt" and the flour measureA handful is genuinely imprecise. For 2 quarts of sifted flour, which is roughly 8 cups or 2 lb, about 4 teaspoons of fine salt is in the right range. Sifting and warming the flour to take out the "cold chill" mattered in an unheated pantry; room-temperature flour needs nothing done to it.
- That hour of kneadingAn hour is a farmhouse figure for working a very large slack dough by hand, adding flour as it goes. Modern practice reaches the same point faster: knead 12 to 15 minutes by hand, or 8 to 10 in a stand mixer, and resist adding flour past the point where the dough is merely tacky. Overstiffening the dough is an easy fault with this method.
- No oven temperature is givenBread of this period went into a wood- or coal-fired oven on falling heat. Bake the moulded loaves after a full final rise at 400F for 35 to 45 minutes for standard pans, until the internal temperature reaches 200F and the bottoms sound hollow.
- YieldThe bread stage uses about 2 quarts of flour plus the overnight sponge, which itself carried several more cups. Expect four to five 1½ lb loaves. Halving the whole thing is reasonable for a domestic oven; the hop yeast does not scale down as neatly, so make it in full and refrigerate the surplus.
Hop yeast was the standard answer to a problem that vanished with the grocery store: how to keep a live leaven going in a house with no reliable source of fresh yeast. The potato feeds it, the sugar starts it, and the hops act as a preservative, which is why the same plant turns up in beer for the same reason. Recipes of this kind were often said to pass between neighbours as a cup of "starter", and the two-stage structure here, barm first, sponge overnight, dough in the morning, is a common shape for them. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book is telling: the book was assembled by Lake of the Woods Milling Company from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives and farmers, and this one carries a name and an address in Beaver Creek, British Columbia. By the 1910s purchased yeast was sold widely enough that Thomas Orr could use two cakes of it to start his hop yeast, an intermediate moment between wild leaven and the packet of dry yeast that made the whole procedure unnecessary.