Alum Yeast
On one pint of flour pour enough boiling water to make a thick batter, stirring it until perfectly smooth, and then let it stand till milk-warm. Then add a teaspoonful of powdered alum. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 1 tablespoonful of sugar. Half a teacup of yeast.
After it ferments, add enough meal to make it a stiff dough. Let it stand till it works, and then spread it in the shade to dry.
To a quart of flour put a tablespoonful of crumbs.--Mrs. P.
This is not a bread but a leaven: a wet flour ferment stiffened with cornmeal, dried into crumbly cakes, and stored for later baking. It made sense in a kitchen with no refrigeration and no packaged yeast, and it needs translation on nearly every line.
- The hinge: it must already be fermenting before you dry itThe batter is inoculated with half a teacup of live yeast from an earlier batch, and both fermentations — the batter, and again after the meal goes in — should be visibly active before drying. Dry it too early and the cakes are inert flour crumbs; dry it too warm and you risk killing the culture. "In the shade" keeps the mass out of direct sun, which would both overheat it and dry a crust that traps moisture inside; ordinary room temperature with some air movement is what is wanted.
- "Yeast" here means a starter, not a packetHalf a teacup is roughly 2 fl oz of liquid barm or a previous batch of homemade yeast. A well-fed sourdough starter at pourable consistency is the nearest modern equivalent; instant dry yeast is a different population of organisms and may not behave the same way through a drying cycle.
- Meal is cornmealIn a Virginia book of this period "meal" without qualification is generally cornmeal, and its main job here is as a carrier. It absorbs the wet ferment and lets the mass be crumbled into cakes that dry through rather than case-hardening.
- Milk-warmAbout 95-100F — warm to a finger, not hot. Alum and yeast both go into the batter at this point, so a scalding batter would defeat the whole thing.
- The alumPowdered alum is potassium aluminum sulfate, still sold as pickling alum. Nineteenth-century cooks added it to yeast and bread believing it whitened flour and checked souring; it is astringent and mildly inhibitory, which is closer to slowing your ferment than helping it. It contributes nothing a modern baker wants and can simply be left out.
- Drying and storageCrumble to pea size and spread thinly on a cloth or rack, turning daily until snapping-dry, then keep in a sealed jar in a cool place. Any smell of mildew or visible fuzz means the batch went off during drying and should be discarded rather than baked with.
- Rate of use, and expect a long riseA tablespoon of crumbs to a quart of flour is a very small inoculation by modern standards, so expect a long rise; doughs raised with homemade yeast were commonly set overnight, eight to twelve hours. Judge by the dough, not the clock.
- YieldOne pint of flour plus the meal gives enough dried crumbs to raise a great many loaves — on the stated rate, well over a dozen quarts of flour. Halve it unless you bake constantly.
Dried yeast cakes like this one were the standard domestic answer to a problem that packaged yeast later solved: how to keep a leaven alive between bakings in a house without cold storage. Compressed fresh yeast reached American markets in the later nineteenth century and granulated dry yeast only in the twentieth, so a cook in 1878 either kept a wet barm going, borrowed from a neighbor, or dried her own culture into crumbs as Mrs. P. does here. The alum is the period detail worth noticing. Adding it to bread and yeast was widespread enough to become a public scandal in both Britain and America — Frederick Accum's 1820 Treatise on Adulterations of Food is the usual starting point for the controversy — and by the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia appeared in 1878, alum in the bread supply was a familiar complaint of food reformers even as household recipes went on recommending it. Its presence here is a reminder that Marion Cabell Tyree's book is a collection of contributed family practice, gathered under the initials of the women who sent it in, rather than a tested or edited system.