Yeast
6 pared potatoes cup sugar ½ cup hops 1 cup salt 2 quarts water 1 cup yeast, or 1 yeast cake Boil water and hops five minutes. Strain; add grated potatoes; boil five minutes; add sugar and salt; when lukewarm add yeast or yeast cake which has been dissolved in one fourth cup lukewarm water; let rise for six hours; pour into scalded stone jug; cork tightly; keep in cool place. 2 cups scalded milk 1 tablespoon lard 1 tablespoon butter
This is not a bread but the leaven for one: a hop-and-potato yeast of the sort kept going in a jug on a cool cellar shelf. It works, but the text as printed is missing a figure and has picked up three lines from the recipe that followed it.
- The stray last line"2 cups scalded milk, 1 tablespoon lard, 1 tablespoon butter" belongs to the next recipe on the page, almost certainly a bread or roll dough. Ignore it here; nothing in the yeast is scalded with milk or enriched with fat.
- The missing sugar quantityThe original reads "cup sugar" with the fraction lost in printing. Period hop yeasts vary considerably in their sugar, and there is no way to recover which quantity was intended, so treat it as ambiguous.
- HopsDried hop flowers, measured loose. Brewing-grade whole-cone hops are the nearest modern equivalent. The hops are there for bitterness and their mild antibacterial effect, which helps keep the jug from souring, not for flavour in the bread.
- That cup of saltIt may well be a misprint: a cup to two quarts is a very heavy dose and would slow, not merely steady, the culture. If you follow it as printed, reduce the salt in any bread you raise with this, or the dough will be sluggish and oversalted.
- "1 yeast cake"A compressed fresh cake; modern cakes run about 0.6 oz, though period cakes varied in size, and fresh cake yeast is now hard to come by. Substitute one packet of active dry yeast, softened in the quarter cup of lukewarm water as directed. "1 cup yeast" means a cup of the previous batch of this same liquid yeast.
- Lukewarm means 95-105FLukewarm -- the book gives no figure; take it as about blood heat. The potato mixture must cool before the yeast goes in, since real heat will kill it, and the point of the six-hour rise is a vigorous, foaming ferment before it goes into cold storage.
- Do not cork it tightlyAn active ferment in a corked stone jug can build real pressure. Use a jar with a loose lid or a cloth cover for the first day or two, then refrigerate.
- Keeping and using"A cool place" meant a cellar, well below kitchen temperature; a refrigerator is closer and safer. Two quarts is a great deal of leaven -- reckon on something like half a cup per loaf, shaken before pouring, with a longer rise than a modern packet gives. Use it within a couple of weeks, or hold back a cup to start the next batch.
Hop yeast was standard household equipment in nineteenth-century America, when reliable purchased leaven was neither cheap nor universally available: bitter hops kept the jug from turning, grated potato fed the culture, and salt and sugar held it steady between baking days. The wide adoption of compressed fresh yeast, generally traced to Fleischmann's promotion of it in the 1870s, made recipes like this one steadily less necessary, which is why it reads here as a survival rather than a necessity. Lowney's Cook Book was issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, as a general household volume with its own products woven through it — and general household volumes of that date still carried a yeast recipe for readers who baked far from a grocer.