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Plain Buns (Potato Yeast)
Boil 2 medium sized potatoes. When done, put through a colander into a crock containing 2 cups white sugar and 1 tablespoon lard. Add enough water to make about 1 pint of mixture, 1 small cup homemade yeast and enough Five Roses flour to make a batter but not too stiff. Add 1 good teaspoon salt. Care must be taken taken not to have the mixture too hot before adding the yeast. Set in warm place to rise. When nice and light, emply into your bread pan and add 1 pint of warm water and enough Five Roses flour to make a soft dough, but mix until it will not stick to the hands. Let stand until light. Make up into the pans and let get very light before baking.
A potato-sponge bun dough from the era when most households kept a jar of liquid yeast going on the shelf. The method is sound, but almost every quantity here assumes knowledge the page does not supply.
- The hinge: temperature before the yeastThe recipe warns of it explicitly, and it is the whole risk. Hot mashed potato and sugar will hold heat far longer than it looks; wait until the mixture is no warmer than lukewarm, around 100F, before the yeast goes in. Much above 120F the culture is stressed, and by 130-140F it is killed outright and the sponge never rises.
- Homemade yeast"1 small cup homemade yeast" means a cup of liquid potato or hop yeast, kept alive from batch to batch — a wet starter, not a dry granule. There is no clean equivalent in packets, since the starter contributes both liquid and leavening. A cup of active 100%-hydration sourdough starter behaves most like it, though the flavour will be tangier and the rise slower.
- The sugar is not a typoTwo cups of sugar in a dough built on about a quart of total liquid is a heavily sweetened bun, closer to a tea bun than a dinner roll. That much sugar draws water from the yeast and slows fermentation considerably, which is why the recipe keeps insisting on letting things get "very light" rather than giving times.
- Crock and bread panThe crock is a stoneware jar for the sponge; any large bowl does. "Empty into your bread pan" appears to mean the large mixing pan or trough used for making up bread, not a loaf tin -- the loaf pans only appear at "make up into the pans."
- Flour is unmeasured on purposeThe first addition is enough for a loose batter that will drop from a spoon; the second brings it to a soft dough that cleans the hands. Expect somewhere in the range of 8 to 10 cups total, but go by feel, since potato-enriched doughs vary with how wet the potatoes were.
- LardOne tablespoon of lard in this volume of dough is a token enrichment for softness. Butter or shortening substitutes directly with no adjustment.
- Rising timesThe sponge will take 2 to 4 hours with a lively starter, longer if the kitchen is cool. The shaped buns need a full proof — "very light" means nearly doubled and slack to the touch, which with this much sugar can run well past an hour.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Sweet buns of this kind bake at 375F for 15 to 20 minutes; the sugar browns fast, so watch the tops rather than the clock.
- YieldProbably three to four dozen buns depending on how large they are made, filling several pans. It halves without trouble.
Potato yeast was a mainstay of home baking across rural Canada and the northern United States before compressed yeast became reliably available in small towns. A cook boiled potatoes, sweetened and thinned the mash, and let wild and carried-over yeasts work in it; the starch fed the culture and the resulting bread stayed moist longer than a straight flour dough. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, was assembled largely from recipes sent in by women who used the brand, which is why the instructions read like one baker talking to another. The doubled "taken taken" and the misspelled "emply" may come from the submitted copy or from the typesetting; there is no way to tell. The absence of oven temperatures reflects period practice, when much home baking was still done in wood ranges for which a number would have meant little.