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Salt-Rising Bread (No. 1)
At 6 o'clock a.m. mix 1 cup cornmeal with enough cold water to wet it. Stir this into 1 pint boiling water. Let boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Set off the fire and add 2 pints fresh sweet milk (yet warm from the cow), 1 tablespoon salt and 1 tablespoon sugar. Let cool, then stir in enough Five Roses flour to make a soft batter. Keep in warm place (should be kept lukewarm, for if it gets chilled it is ruined). At about 10 or 11 o'clock, when it seems thin, stir in ½ pint more flour. It should be ready to finish mixing by 1 o'clock. Add 1 pint fresh thick buttermilk and 1 teaspoon soda, with enough flour to make a rather soft dough. Mould into loaves, put in greased pans, let rise 1 hour, then bake. I think Five Roses flour the best I've ever used. -Mrs. R. N. Lay, Sanderville, Alta.
A working recipe, but an unusually demanding one: the leavening is a wild bacterial culture, not yeast, and the whole thing turns on holding a narrow temperature for seven hours. Read the timeline before you start.
- The hinge: steady warmthThe starter must sit at roughly 100-110F from 6 a.m. until it foams. Below about 90F it stalls and the recipe is right that a chilled batter is finished. A turned-off oven with the light on, a proofing box, a yogurt maker or a cooler with jars of hot water all work better than the back of a stove.
- No yeast, and no substitutingNothing here is yeast. The rise comes from bacteria present in the cornmeal, and coarse stone-ground meal is often said to work better than degerminated supermarket meal. Adding commercial yeast gives you a different bread entirely and masks whether the ferment took.
- UnitsOn the US measure a pint is 2 cups, so 2 pints milk is 4 cups, 1 pint buttermilk is 2 cups, and the '1/2 pint more flour' is about 1 cup, roughly 4 1/2 oz by weight. Bear in mind that a Canadian imperial pint is 20 fl oz, or 2 1/2 cups, so the quantities may be a quarter larger than that.
- Milk warm from the cowUse whole pasteurized milk warmed to about 100F. Raw milk is not required for the ferment, which is driven by the scalded cornmeal, and the buttermilk added later should be cultured buttermilk rather than the thin liquid left from churning.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F for 40-50 minutes, until the loaves are deeply browned and read 200-205F inside. Salt-rising dough has little oven spring, so do not wait for a dramatic rise in the pan.
- The smellA sharp cheesy, slightly sour smell from the batter at mid-morning means it is working. A putrid or vomit-like smell, or no activity at all by noon, means the culture failed; discard it and start again rather than baking it.
- Soda and buttermilkThe teaspoon of soda neutralizes the acid the bacteria have produced and lightens the crumb; it is not the main leavening, though the soda-and-buttermilk reaction does give some lift. Mix it in and get the loaves shaped promptly, since the reaction begins at once.
- Yield and eatingEating -- The crumb is close, dense and fine-holed rather than airy, and the bread is often preferred toasted.
Salt-rising bread was a genuinely distinct American leavening tradition, documented in Appalachia and the Ohio Valley by the early nineteenth century and carried west and north with settlement; the name is usually traced to the practice of nesting the starter crock in a box of warm salt or warm ashes to hold its heat overnight, though the explanation is traditional rather than proven. It survived where brewer's yeast and later compressed yeast were unreliable or unavailable, and it died out quickly once packaged yeast reached rural stores, because the ferment is temperamental and the bread keeps poorly. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book, compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives to the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, catches it in its last generation of everyday use: two prairie contributors, one from Alberta and one from Saskatchewan, still treating it as an ordinary loaf rather than a curiosity.