Bread: Sift
Sift salt with three cupfuls of flour, beat vigorously into liquid, and let sponge rise. Cream the lard, butter, and sugar; dredge the fruit with flour and add to the sponge. Add sufficient flour to make a soft dough.
Knead thoroughly and set to rise.
When light, divide, form into loaves, put in bread pans, and when ready, bake in slightly cooler oven than is required for plain bread. For the fruit in this bread, use either raisins, currants, citron, dates, figs, or prunelles.
Bread Made with Dry Yeast. 2 quarts flour, 2½ cupfuls warm water, 2 tablespoonfuls lard, 1 yeast cake, 1 tablespoonful sugar, 1 teaspoonful salt.
Sift the flour in the bread pan; break up the yeast cake and put in a quart bowl; then add a gill of water, and mash with a spoon until the yeast and water are well mixed. Beat in 1 gill of flour. Cover the bowl and set in a warm place for two hours.
At the end of that time the batter should be a perfect sponge. Add to the sponge a pint of warm water, half the lard, also salt and sugar.
Stir this mixture into the flour and mix with a spoon. Sprinkle the board with flour, turn out the dough, knead twenty minutes, using as little flour as possible. At the end of this time the ball of dough should be soft, smooth, and elastic. Place the dough in the bowl and rub the second spoonful of butter or lard over it.
Cover with a towel, then a tin cover.
Set the bowl in a warm place and let it raise over night. In the morning the dough will have increased to three times its original volume and be a perfect sponge. Knead it in the bowl for five minutes-do not use flour-then shape into three small loaves. Put these in deep pans, and with a sharp knife cut lengthwise through the center of each loaf. Put the pans in a warm place and cover with a towel. Let the loaves rise to twice their size, then bake fifty minutes. کے BREAD Sweet-Potato Bread. 1 cake yeast, cupful lukewarm water, 1 cupful scalded milk, 1 tablespoonful salt, cupful sugar, 1 cupful sweet mashed potatoes, 3 tablespoonfuls melted butter.
Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water, add the milk, salt, sugar , and potatoes (roasted, scraped from the skins, and worked to a cream with the melted butter), then allow to cool. Beat all together until light, then stir in with a wooden spoon enough flour to make a soft dough.
Throw a cloth over the bread bowl and set in a warm place until well raised. Make into small loaves; let them rise for an hour and bake in a brisk oven.
Salt-Rising Bread. 2 cupfuls hot water, 1½ teaspoonfuls salt, 1 pint lukewarm milk, Flour.
Dissolve teaspoonful salt in hot water, and beat in gradually enough flour to make a very soft dough.
Three straightforward yeast doughs from the era just before packaged active dry yeast, written for a cook who was expected to judge rising by eye. The measures and vessels need translating more than the method does.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The dry-yeast loaf therefore starts with half a cup of water and half a cup of flour for the initial sponge, then takes a further pint (two cups) of warm water.
- What a yeast cake wasA cake of yeast, not a modern sachet. This recipe is headed 'Bread Made with Dry Yeast', so the cake was more likely a dried yeast cake than compressed fresh (a compressed cake ran about 0.6 oz). Either way, substitute about 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast; with instant yeast you can skip the mashing step and whisk it into the warm water.
- Flour by volumeTwo quarts of flour is about 8 cups, near 2 lb. Flour of the period varied and was often lower in protein than modern bread flour, so hold back the last cup or two and add only what the dough demands.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives no figures. As modern equivalents, plain bread is usually baked around 425F, so the fruit bread's 'slightly cooler' oven would fall near 350-375F, since sugar and dried fruit scorch; 'brisk' is conventionally read as roughly 400-425F. For the fifty-minute bake, judge by an internal temperature of 190-200F rather than the clock.
- The overnight riseA warm kitchen overnight can over-proof a dough raised with modern yeast into a sour, collapsing mass. Either cut the yeast back for an overnight rise, or refrigerate the bowl and let it come back to room temperature in the morning.
- Kneading twenty minutesThat is hand-kneading. In a stand mixer with a dough hook, 8-10 minutes on medium should get the same soft, smooth, elastic ball. The instruction to use as little extra flour as possible is the one to obey.
- Slashing and shapingThe recipe cuts the loaves lengthwise with a sharp knife straight after shaping, before the final rise, rather than just before baking as a modern baker would slash. About half an inch deep is enough.
- Sweet-potato doughRoasting rather than boiling the potatoes keeps the flesh dry, which matters because the recipe gives no flour quantity at all; go by feel for a soft dough. Let the potato-milk mixture cool to blood heat before it meets the yeast.
- YieldThe dry-yeast recipe makes three small loaves in deep pans, each roughly a pound. The sweet-potato dough is simply directed to be made into small loaves; no quantity is given.
Household manuals of this period sit at the hinge between homemade and bought yeast. Salt-rising bread, the entry that closes this page, is the older survival: it is leavened not by baker's yeast at all but by a wild ferment of scalded flour held warm overnight, a technique generally traced to Appalachian and frontier kitchens where a reliable yeast cake was hard to come by. Its distinctive cheesy smell comes from bacteria rather than Saccharomyces. Alongside it the book prints a recipe built entirely around a purchased yeast cake, and another that stretches wheat flour with mashed sweet potato, a thrift habit often associated with Southern cooking though widespread elsewhere, and one that also happens to keep a loaf moist for days. Fruited breads like the one at the head of the page were the household's answer to cake: the same dough, enriched with lard, butter and sugar, dredging the raisins or citron in flour so they would not sink through the crumb.