Leaven
2 tablespoonfuls of flour. 1 tablespoonful of lard or butter. 2 tablespoonfuls of yeast. 2 eggs. 1 potato. 2 teaspoonfuls of sugar. Make the leaven soon after breakfast in winter, and at one o'clock P. M. in summer. Let it be of the consistency of batter. Put it in a small bucket, in a warm place, to rise till four o'clock P. M. This amount of leaven is sufficient for two quarts of flour. If for loaf bread, leave out the eggs and butter.--Mrs. M.
This is not a bread recipe but the sponge that raises one — a same-day preferment built on potato and homemade yeast. Two things in it are not what a modern cook would assume: the "yeast" and the missing liquid.
- The yeast is liquid"2 tablespoonfuls of yeast" most likely means a spoonful of the home-kept liquid or potato yeast of the period rather than granules. If substituting, something on the order of a teaspoon of instant dry yeast, or a couple of tablespoons of an active liquid starter, is a plausible stand-in, though the strength of the original cannot be known.
- The potato and the missing liquidThe recipe names no liquid and says nothing about how to treat the potato. The usual period practice was to boil and mash it and use its cooking water, but that is inference rather than instruction. Add warm water gradually until the mixture reaches batter consistency rather than working to a fixed quantity.
- "Consistency of batter"Aim for something that pours slowly, like thick pancake batter. Too stiff and it will not rise freely in the bucket; too thin and it will collapse rather than dome.
- Why the clock changes with the seasonThe morning start in winter and the one o'clock start in summer both aim at the same four o'clock finish, so a cold kitchen is given most of the working day and a hot one about three hours. Judge by the sponge, not the clock: it is ready when risen, bubbled and smelling sharply of yeast.
- "A warm place"In a wood-stove kitchen this would likely have been a shelf near the range; the recipe gives no temperature. A turned-off oven with the light on, or the top of the refrigerator, is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- The bucketThe recipe specifies a small bucket but does not say why. Whatever the vessel, use one several times the volume of the batter and cover it loosely rather than sealing it.
- YieldTwo quarts of flour is about 8 to 9 cups, enough for two good loaves or three to four dozen rolls. Scale the leaven down proportionally if you are baking less.
- The eggsEggs and butter make this a sponge for rich rolls, and the instruction to leave them out for loaf bread is worth noting. The enriched batter does stand for several hours in a warm place before it is baked.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, dates from a period when commercial compressed yeast was not yet in general use. Many households that baked wheat bread kept their own leaven alive, and potato was one common food for it: the starch converts readily to sugars the yeast can use, and a potato sponge rises fast and reliably in a warm kitchen. Recipes like this one, credited only to "Mrs. M.", show how such books worked \,, a network of neighbors' formulas, each assuming the reader already knew what a bucket of yeast looked like and how a kitchen felt at four in the afternoon. Packaged yeast sold at the grocery would eventually make the morning ritual, and the seasonal timing it demanded, unnecessary for many cooks, though home-kept yeasts persisted for decades.