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Bread in Five Hours
Scald one quart of milk and let cool to blood heat. Add two dissolved yeast cakes, two teaspoons of salt and two teaspoons of sugar. Use this for the wetting of the sifted flour, which should be of sufficient quantity to make a fairly stiff dough. Let rise in a room where the temperature is 80 degrees, for four hours. Knead into small loaves, put into greased pans and let rise, then bake for half an hour. In the first mixing use a spoon and beat the dough vigorously to insure a perfect mixing of wetting and flour. In the kneading for the pans, work each loaf three or four minutes. This method insures the best bread ever eaten.-Mrs William A.
Herron, Pittsburg.
A plain milk bread with almost no fat, written for a cook who already knew what bread dough should feel like. The gaps worth filling are the yeast, the flour quantity and the oven, none of which the original states in modern terms.
- Blood heatRoughly 98-100F, warm but not hot to a clean finger. Scalded milk that is still above about 115F will damage the yeast, so let it cool properly before the yeast goes in.
- Two yeast cakesMost likely compressed fresh yeast, though cake sizes varied by maker in this period; the nearest modern equivalent is the 0.6 oz cake. Two 1/4-oz packets of active dry or instant yeast, about 4 1/2 teaspoons, is a reasonable substitute, and the generous quantity is part of why the whole process fits in five hours.
- Why scald the milk at allThe usual explanation is that milk contains whey proteins or enzymes that slacken gluten and give a soggy loaf, though the point is debated; scalding also kept the milk from souring. With modern pasteurised milk the step is generally held to be unnecessary, but heating and cooling does no harm and helps dissolve the salt and sugar.
- Flour quantityA quart of milk will take somewhere in the region of 12 to 14 cups of all-purpose flour for a fairly stiff dough. Hold back the last cup or two and add it as needed; the original deliberately leaves this to the hand rather than the cup.
- The 80-degree roomThat is 80F, warmer than most modern kitchens. An oven with only the light on, or a turned-off oven with a pan of hot water beneath, gets you there; at 68F the first rise will take considerably longer than four hours.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as the book assumes a hot bread oven. Half an hour suits loaves at 400-425F; the loaf is done at an internal 190-200F and sounds hollow when rapped underneath.
- KneadingThree or four minutes per loaf is short by modern standards because the long first rise has already developed the gluten. Do not skip the vigorous beating at the first mixing, which is where the structure actually starts.
- YieldExpect three to four standard 9x5 loaves. The dough contains no butter or oil, so it stales quickly and is at its best the day it is baked, or toasted thereafter.
Recipes signed with a contributor's name and city were a staple of American household magazines and the cookbooks compiled from them; "Mrs William A. Herron, Pittsburg" would have been a reader whose method the editors judged worth printing, and the confident closing claim is hers rather than the book's. The title is the selling point: bread made with a sponge and a slow overnight rise was the older domestic norm, and a five-hour straight dough advertised the reliability of manufactured compressed yeast, sold in foil-wrapped cakes and widely available by the turn of the twentieth century. The high proportion of yeast, the warm room and the short kneading all point the same way, toward a loaf that could be started after breakfast and eaten at supper. Note also the spelling "Pittsburg", standard in American usage during the period when the city's name was officially rendered without the final h.