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Five-hour Bread
Use any of the recipes for bread, using one yeast cake instead of amount of yeast given. The bread should be made and baked in five hours' time.
This is not a standalone formula but a substitution note: swap the book's homemade or liquid yeast for a single compressed cake and the whole loaf, mixing to cooling, fits in an afternoon. What follows is what you need to translate it.
- One yeast cakeA compressed cake is roughly equivalent to a modern packet of active dry or instant yeast (about 2 1/4 teaspoons), though period cakes were sold in more than one size, so the equivalence is approximate. A packet is generally reckoned enough for two loaves.
- What it replacesThe recipe directs the cook to substitute one cake for whatever quantity of yeast the parent recipe calls for. Where that parent recipe uses a slower homemade or liquid yeast, the compressed cake is what shortens the timetable.
- Where the five hours goReckon roughly 20 minutes to mix and knead, 1 1/2 to 2 hours for the first rise, 45 minutes to an hour after shaping, 35 to 45 minutes baking, and the rest cooling. Watch the dough rather than the clock.
- Oven heatNo oven heat is given here; follow the parent bread recipe. A loaf of this size is done at an internal temperature of 200-210F and sounds hollow when rapped on the bottom.
- Keep the dough warmThe five-hour schedule depends on a warm dough and a draught-free place to rise; a cold kitchen will stretch it out. Use warm, not hot, liquid.
- Don't rush the second riseCutting the proof short to hit the deadline gives a dense loaf with a coarse, tunnelled crumb. The shaped loaf should nearly double and hold a slow dent when pressed.
- YieldDepends on the parent bread recipe, which is not reproduced here.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, belongs to the moment when commercial compressed yeast was displacing the household yeast pot in American kitchens, a transition still incomplete in 1907. Nineteenth-century bread depended on homemade yeast kept alive from batch to batch, or on liquid brewer's yeast bought from a brewery, both of which worked slowly and unreliably and demanded an overnight sponge. Fleischmann's compressed cakes, promoted heavily from the 1870s onward, were strong and predictable enough that a cook could start bread after breakfast and slice it at supper, and a "quick" or "five-hour" note could sit alongside the old long-rise directions so that either method could be followed from the same set of proportions. The note is worth reading as a small record of a technology change rather than as a recipe in its own right.