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White Bread, Sponge Method
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 1/2 quarts lukewarm water 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 4 1/2 quarts sifted flour 2 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 1 tablespoonful salt THE sponge dough method given herewith requires from five and a half to six hours. If followed closely, it will give excellent Bread having a delightful keep-fresh quality. Where a richer loaf is desired, milk may be substituted in whole or part for the water.
Dissolve the yeast and sugar in one quart of the lukewarm water, and add one and one-half quarts of sifted flour, or sufficient to make an ordinary sponge. Beat well. Cover and set aside to rise for about one and one-half hours in a warm place.
When well-risen add the pint of lukewarm water, lard or butter, the remainder of the flour, or enough to make a moderately firm dough, and the salt. Knead thoroughly; place in greased bowl. Cover and let rise from one and one-half to two hours.
When light, mould into loaves and place in well-greased baking pans, cover and let rise again for about one hour. When light, bake forty to fifty minutes, reducing the heat of oven after first ten minutes. This recipe makes four large loaves.
The book’s full-scale loaf: eighteen cups of flour, four large loaves, five and a half to six hours from start to oven. Almost nobody now wants that much bread at once, so the first decision is how far to cut it.
- Quartering it gives one loafFour and a half quarts of sifted flour is eighteen cups, and the yield is four large loaves. A quarter of everything comes out in workable numbers: four and a half cups of flour, a cup of water for the sponge and half a cup added later, a quarter of a cake of yeast, a teaspoon and a half of sugar, half a tablespoon of fat. The salt is the one figure worth reconsidering rather than dividing.
- The salt is lowA tablespoon of salt against eighteen cups of flour is under one per cent of the flour weight, where modern bread formulas run close to two. Raising it is the single change most bakers would make here, and it does more than season: salt slows the ferment and tightens the dough, and a six-hour sponge can use both.
- The pint that was never listedThe ingredients give a quart and a half of water. The method uses a quart of it in the sponge and then calls for “the pint” of lukewarm water later on, without that pint having been named anywhere. It is the remaining half quart and nothing else. Nothing has gone missing from the page.
- One cake of yeast for four loavesThat is far less yeast per pound of flour than a quick dough needs, and the sponge is the whole reason. An hour and a half in a loose flour-and-water batter, before the salt and the fat arrive to slow things down, lets the yeast multiply into the quantity the full dough will require. A cake of compressed yeast is about two and a quarter teaspoons of modern active dry, or one 7g sachet.
- Reducing the heat after ten minutesA range with a damper let the cook drop the temperature by hand mid-bake. The modern reading is to load the loaves into a hot oven, around 425°F (220°C), and bring it down to about 375°F (190°C) after the first ten minutes: high heat for the spring, lower heat for the forty minutes it takes to cook four large loaves through to the middle.
- Milk in place of waterThe note that milk may be substituted in whole or in part is a genuine option and it changes the loaf: softer crumb, darker crust, shorter keeping. The exchange is by volume, measure for measure.
The booklet gives three ways to make the same white loaf — quick, sponge and over-night — and the order they come in says what the book was arguing. The quick method goes first, because speed was what compressed yeast had to sell. The sponge method here is the older practice, the one a cook already knew: a loose batter set to work, then built out into a dough hours later. Including it was a bridge as much as a recipe, a way of showing that the new product would do the familiar thing as well as the fast one. And the figures describe a particular kind of household. Five and a half to six hours, ending in four large loaves, is a bake that happened once or twice a week rather than daily, in a kitchen where somebody was present all day to watch it rise.