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One Yolk of an Egg
or 4 1 of flow 4 1 gell of milk add beaten up white last old Wah + 2 White togethe Cream the yeast and sugar together. Warm the milk and add it. Add the yolk of an egg to the flour, then strain the yeast to it. Mix well and allow to rise an hour and a half.
Mauviettes en Caisse à la
The page has survived scanning badly: the ingredient list at the top is a scramble of half-read figures, and the last line is the title of the following recipe, not part of this one. What remains legible is the method for a yeast-raised batter — flour, milk, yeast, sugar, an egg yolk, with whipped whites folded in at the end — the sort used for frying, for pancakes, or as the base of a light raised paste.
- The quantities are not recoverable"4 1 of flow 4 1 gell of milk" cannot be honestly converted; the numerals have been lost. Anyone wanting to cook from this needs to work from a modern yeast batter formula and use the original only for its method.
- A gillA gill is a quarter of a pint: 5 fl oz in British imperial measure (the US gill, 4 fl oz, is smaller). The word is sometimes said to have been used loosely for a small tumblerful.
- The yeast is fresh, not dried"Cream the yeast and sugar together" describes compressed or brewer's yeast worked to a liquid paste with a little sugar. Modern instant dry yeast is not creamed and does not need it. The quantity here is lost with the rest of the figures.
- Why it is strainedStraining the creamed yeast into the flour catches the lumps and any spent barm, which matters more with the variable fresh yeast of the period than with today's product. It is a step you can skip with dried yeast.
- Warm the milk, do not heat it"Warm" here means blood heat, around 98-100F. Milk much hotter than that will slow the yeast, and hotter still will kill it; this batter has no chemical raising agent to fall back on.
- The whites go in lastThe garbled note at the top reads "add beaten up white last", which suggests whipped whites folded in at the end rather than at the mixing stage, though the surviving method does not say where. If they are folded in after the rise, the batter wants using promptly before the beaten-in air collapses.
- The riseAn hour and a half suits a warm kitchen corner. In a cooler modern kitchen it may take longer; judge by the batter being domed and visibly bubbled rather than by the clock.
- The stray last lineMauviettes en caisse -- larks in paper cases -- is the heading of the recipe that follows. It is not an instruction to put this batter in cases.
Yeast-raised batters sit awkwardly between the baker's work and the cook's, which may be why this one turns up unlabelled between other recipes. A cook wanting a fritter coating or a light raised paste that fried crisp and hollow could cream a lump of compressed yeast with sugar, slacken it with warm milk, and give it an hour or more to work -- the same principle as the French pate a beignets levee. The egg yolk enriches and colours; whipped whites folded in at the last moment do the work that a modern cook would get from baking powder or soda water. The recipe that follows it, larks served in individual paper cases, suggests the sort of cookery the book was written for: small birds and individual service.