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American Rye Bread
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 cup of milk, scalded and cooled 2 cups lukewarm water 5 cups rye flour 1 1/2 cups sifted white flour 1 tablespoonful lard or butter, melted 1 tablespoonful salt RYE Bread is particularly rich in gluten--a most valuable element in any Bread. Its zest and piquant flavor make it a welcome change, served "just so" or made into sandwiches with a variety of fillings.
Dissolve yeast in lukewarm liquid, add two and one-half cups rye flour, or enough to make sponge. Beat well. Cover and set aside in a warm place, free from draught to rise about two hours.
When light, add white flour, lard or butter, rest of rye flour, or enough to make a soft dough, and the salt. Turn on a board and knead, or pound it five minutes. Place in greased bowl, cover and let rise until double in bulk--about two hours.
Turn on board and shape into long loaves. Place in shallow pans, cover and let rise again until light--about one hour. Brush with white of egg and water, to glaze. With sharp knife cut lightly three strokes diagonally across top, and place in oven. Bake in slower oven than for white Bread. Caraway seed may be used if desired.
NOTE:--By adding one-half cup of sour dough, left from previous baking, an acid flavor is obtained, which is considered by many a great improvement. This should be added to the sponge.
Mostly rye, with a little white flour doing the structural work, raised by the sponge method over about five hours. The booklet names oven speeds rather than temperatures, because the ranges it was written for had no thermostat.
- One cake of yeastA cake of Fleischmann’s compressed yeast stands in for about two and a quarter teaspoons of modern active dry yeast, or one 7g sachet. Compressed yeast was sold fresh and crumbled straight into the warm liquid, which is why every recipe in the book opens by dissolving it. Dry yeast behaves the same way here.
- The gluten claim is backwardsThe booklet says rye is “particularly rich in gluten.” Rye has plenty of protein, but very little of it forms the elastic network that holds a wheat loaf up. That is what the cup and a half of white flour is for, and it is why this dough stays slack and tacky instead of turning springy under the hands. Resist the urge to flour it into submission.
- A slower ovenNo temperature is given anywhere. In the oven vocabulary of the period, a hot oven runs roughly 400°F to 425°F and a moderate one about 350°F to 375°F, so a loaf baked slower than white bread belongs near the moderate end. Rye browns early because of its sugars, so judge by the base sounding hollow rather than by the color of the crust.
- The half cup of sour doughThe note at the bottom means old dough, not a liquid starter: a lump held back from the last baking, kept covered and cold, and worked into the new sponge. It carries lactic acid across along with the yeast, which is where the sourness comes from. A first batch goes without.
- Scalding the milkMilk was scalded to knock back enzymes in raw milk that slackened dough. Pasteurized milk has already been through that, so it needs only warming to blood heat before it meets the yeast.
- The glaze and the cutsEgg white and water give the dull, crackling sheen the booklet is after; a yolk wash would make it glossy instead. Keep the three diagonal cuts shallow and quick, with a razor or a very sharp blade, right as the loaf goes in. A dragging knife deflates a slack rye dough.
Rye was the bread grain of northern and eastern Europe, and it came into American kitchens with the people who had grown up eating it. What is interesting on this page is the word “American” in the title. The sour rye of a city bakery took both its lift and its tang from a starter kept alive for weeks; here the lift comes entirely from one cake of manufactured yeast, and sourness is demoted to an optional note at the foot of the recipe, something “considered by many a great improvement.” That is the argument of the whole booklet in miniature. Fleischmann’s was not selling flavor. It was selling a loaf that rises on schedule, every time, without anyone having to keep a living culture fed on the back of the stove.