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Improvement in Bread
Take flour 5 lbs. Rice 1 lb. boil the rice very soft, if too thick, add a little warm water, then add your yeast. This makes 8 lbs. of bread.
This is an extender recipe rather than a full method: it tells you the proportions and assumes you already know how to set, knead and bake a loaf. Everything unstated has to be supplied from ordinary bread practice.
- The hinge: cool the rice firstBoiled rice straight off the stove will kill yeast on contact. Mash it smooth with its cooking liquid and let it come down to about 100F before the yeast goes in.
- Proportions5 lb flour is roughly 18 cups; 1 lb dry rice swells to a great deal of soft porridge. The rice and its cooking liquid supply much of the dough's moisture, which may be why no separate liquid is listed beyond the "little warm water" for thinning.
- Yeast quantity"Your yeast" means whatever barm or leaven the household kept. For 5 lb of flour, modern practice would be on the order of two packets of dry yeast, or a proportionate amount of sourdough starter with a correspondingly longer rise.
- Salt is missingThe receipt does not list it, as brief proportion-only entries often do not. Rice-heavy bread is bland without it; roughly 2 percent of the flour weight is the usual modern proportion.
- Handling the doughRice contributes no gluten, so the dough is softer and stickier than an all-wheat dough and rises less vigorously. Resist adding much extra flour; work it with wet hands or a scraper instead.
- BakingThe receipt gives no oven direction at all. Bake large loaves as you would any plain wheat loaf, around 400F to 425F for 40 to 50 minutes, to an internal temperature near 200F.
- YieldEight pounds of bread is three good-sized loaves, or four smaller ones. The arithmetic is the point of the receipt: 6 lb of dry ingredients returning 8 lb of finished loaf.
- KeepingThe extra moisture makes a close, tender, slightly damp crumb that stays fresh a day or two longer than plain white bread but moulds sooner in warm weather.
Titles like "Improvement in Bread" appear throughout nineteenth-century receipt collections, and the improvement is often economy rather than flavour: stretching costly wheat flour with a cheaper starch. Boiled rice, potatoes and cornmeal turn up among the candidates, and the arithmetic at the end of the entry — six pounds in, eight pounds out — is the whole argument, since bread was commonly bought and sold by weight. Rice was a domestic American crop, grown in the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, and rice bread turns up regularly in household books of the period and remained a regional staple in the rice-growing South well after the economising motive had faded. The technique itself is older than the economy: cooked grain or potato added to a wheat dough holds water and keeps the loaf soft, a trick bakers still use in the form of scalded-flour and porridge breads.