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Two-Hour Bread
Take 1 pint of lukewarm water and soak 4 Royal Yeast Cakes. Put in 4 tablespoons of Five Roses flour. Set in warm place to raise.
Cook 12 potatoes, mash and add to this 1 quart of warm water and 1 quart of cold water. Add 1 tablespoon salt and 1 tablespoon sugar. When lukewarm mix in the yeast and set away overnight.
In the morning, warm your flour and warm half your yeast. Mix into a stiff dough. Let rise, then add 1 tablespoon salt and work down stiff, or until the dough does not stick to the hands. Let rise again and then make into loaves.
Note-Many good bread makers claim that potatoes give to their bread a silkiness of texture not obtainable any other way.
A very large potato-water sponge bread from a period when yeast was slow, kitchens were cold, and bakers worked by feel rather than by weight. The instructions assume you know how to judge a dough, and they leave out the oven entirely.
- ScaleTwo and a half quarts of liquid plus twelve potatoes is a bakery-sized batch; the recipe names no flour quantity and no yield, but it will take a very large amount of flour and produce several loaves. Cutting it down sharply gives a manageable two-loaf bake.
- Royal Yeast CakesDry yeast cakes sold by the Royal Baking Powder Company, generally slower and less reliable than modern yeast. Four cakes should not be read as four packets of modern active dry; considerably less modern yeast will do for an overnight sponge, and too much can push the flavour towards sour and beery.
- "Half your yeast"The recipe means half the overnight sponge, not half the original yeast cakes. What becomes of the other half is never said; keeping it back as a starter for the next baking is one plausible reading.
- The potato waterThe recipe calls for the potatoes cooked and mashed, plus a quart each of warm and cold water; it does not say whether to keep the cooking liquid. If you do keep it, count it as part of that water. Potato starch, once broken down to sugars, gives the yeast an easy food supply.
- "Warm your flour"Standard practice in an unheated kitchen: flour straight from a cold pantry drops the dough temperature and stalls the rise. Spread it in a pan in a barely warm oven, or simply work at a dough temperature of 75-80F.
- Temperature disciplineBoth the yeast soak and the potato mixture should be lukewarm, roughly 95-105F, before they meet; liquid still hot from the pot can kill the yeast.
- BakingNo oven is given, as the book assumes you know your own. Loaves of this type bake at 375-400F for 35 to 45 minutes, until they sound hollow and read about 200F at the centre.
- The nameThe two hours appears to refer only to the morning's work rather than the sponge that sat all night; by any modern reckoning it is overnight bread.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and much of it was assembled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which is why the same category can hold half a dozen competing bread methods with contradictory timings. Potato bread of this kind was ordinary domestic practice across North America and Britain well before commercial yeast: the starch in boiled potatoes and their cooking water is broken down into sugars that yeast can feed on, holds moisture in the crumb, and keeps a loaf soft for an extra day, hence the "silkiness" the note claims for it. The overnight sponge belonged to the era of slow dry yeast cakes, when a baker needed a long rise to build enough leavening power to raise a stiff dough, and the practice faded once fast, reliable yeast made the morning-to-noon loaf possible.