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Home › Rural and Domestic Economy › To Make Bread
To Make Bread
tablespoonful of cream; mix them well together, | little more than milk warm. Put in salt sufficient. and place them in the room, on a plate where the flies are troublesome, and they will soon disappear. To make Excellent Bread.
Mix seven pounds of best flour with three pounds of pared boiled potatoes. Steam off the water, and leave them a few minutes on the fire, mash them fine, and mix them whilst quite warm in the flour, with a spoonful or more of salt. Put a quart of water, milk warm, with three large spoonsful of yeast, gradually to the potatoes and flour.
Work it well into a smooth dough, and let it remain four hours before it is baked.
To make Bread with a very small quantity of Yeast.
Put one bushel of flour into the trough, mix three quarters of a pint of warm water, and one teaspoonful of thick yeast well together; pour a small quantity in a hole made in the centre of the flour large enough to contain two gallons of water; then stir with a stick, about two feet long, some of the flour, until it is as thick as pudding batter.
Strew some of the dry flour over it, and let it rest for an hour, then pour about a quart more water, and having stirred it as before, leave it for two hours, and then add a gallon more of warm water.
Stir in the flour again, and in about four hours more, mix up the dough, and cover it warm; in about four hours more you may put it in the oven, and as light bread will be obtained as though a pint of yeast had been used.
To prepare Bread in the Method of the London Bakers.
Sift a sack of flour into the kneading-trough; add six pounds of salt, dissolve them separately in a pailful of water (cooled to 90° Fahr.) with two quarts of yeast. Stir it well, and strain it through a cloth or sieve; afterwards mix it with the flour into a dough, next cover it up with cloths and shut down the trough-lid close to retain the heat. In two hours more mix in another pailful of warm water with the sponge, and again cover it up for two hours. After this knead it for more than an hour, with three pailsful of warm water.
Return the dough to the trough, sprinkle it with dry flour, and in four hours' time knead it well for about half an hour, when it will be fit to mould into loaves.
To prepare Household Bread.
Mix four ounces of salt, three quarts of water, a pint of yeast, and a peck of seconds flour, in a trough. When properly fermented, knead and divide it into loaves. Sometimes a portion of ryemeal, rice. flour, or boiled potatoes, are mixed with the flour previous to the kneading; the two former serve to bind the bread, the latter cause it to be open and spongy.
To produce one-third more Bread from a given Quantity of Wheat.
Boil a bushel of the coarsest bran in seven gallons of water for one hour; keep stirring it, that it may not stick to the bottom; then pour it off into a trough or tub full of holes, over which lay a coarse cloth or sieve. On the top of the whole put a wooden cover, with a weight sufficiently heavy to press out the liquor from the bran, which will sink to the bottom of the tub in a thick pulp.
This liquor will contain the essential oil of the grain, and when kneaded in with a proper proportion of flour it will yield one-third more than the same quantity would made with water in the usual way.
To make French Bread.
Put a pint of milk into three quarts of water.
In winter let it be scalding hot, but in summer Take a pint and a half of good ale yeast, free from bitterness, and lay it in a gallon of water the night before. Pour off the yeast into the milk and water, and then break in rather more than a quarter of a pound of butter. Work it well till it is dissolved; then beat up two eggs in a basin, and stir them in. Mix about a peck and a half of flour with the liquor, and in winter make tho dough pretty stiff, but more slack in summer; mix it well, and the less it is worked the better.
Stir the liquor into flour, as for pie-crust, and after the dough is made cover it with a cloth, and the loaves have lain in a quick oven about a quarlet it lie to rise while the oven is heating. When ter of an hour, turn them on the other side for about a quarter of an hour longer. Then take make them look spongy, and of a fine yellow, them out, and chip them with a knife, which will whereas rasping takes off this fine color, and renders their ders their look less inviting.
To make wholesome Mixed Bread.
Take of rice 3 pounds; boil it in a sufficient quantity of water till reduced to a soft pulp, then rub it with 6 pounds of mealy potatoes, cooked by steam, and, when well blended, add 6 pounds of flour. Make the whole into a dough with water, and ferment with yeast, in the usual manner.
To make Bran Bread.
To four pounds of best household flour put two tablespoonsful of small beer yeast and a half pint of warm water. Let it stand two hours in a warm place. Add half a pound of bran and a teaspoonful of salt; make the dough with skim-milk or warm water ; cover it up and let it stand an hour.
Put the loaves into warm dishes, and let them stand twenty minutes before they go into the oven.
Another Method. whole of the bran, a quarter of a pint of small- Mix with half a peck of flour, containing the beer yeast, and a quart of lukewarm water; stir thick batter, then put a napkin over the dough it well with a wooden spoon until it becomes a rises well. Add, if requisite, a little more warm and set it about three feet from the fire, until it . water, strew over it a tablespoonful of salt, and make the whole into a stiff paste. Put it to the fire, and when it rises again kneed it into the dough. If baked in tins the loaves will be improved. To make Leaven Bread. making, which has been raised by barm; keep it Take about two pounds of dough of the last in a wooden vessel covered well with flour. This will become leaven when sufficiently sour. Work this quantity into a peck of flour with warm water.
Cover the dough close with a cloth or flannel, and keep it in a warm place; further mix it next morn-- with warm water and a little salt. When the ing with two or three bushels of flour, mixed up dough is thoroughly made cover it as before. As soon as it rises knead it well into loaves. Observe in this process, that the more leaven is put fresher the leaven the less sour it will taste. to the flour the lighter the bread will be, and the To make Four Quartern Loaves for Family Use. ful of salt to three quarts of water, and add half a Procure a peck of flour, with which mix a handa handpint of good fresh yeast. Work the whole well together, and set it to rise at a moderate distance from the fire from two to three hours. Then disend it to the baker's. vide it into four equal parts, put it into tins, and To detect Adulteration in Bread.
Run into the crumb of a loaf one day old the blade of a knife considerably heated, and if adulterated with alum it will show its unwholesome adherences on the surface, and it may further be detected by the smell. Bone-dust or plaster of Paris may be discovered by slicing the soft part of a loaf thin and soaking it in a large quantity of water in an earthen vessel placed over a slow fire three or four hours. Then having poured off the water and pap, the obnoxious matter will be found at the bottom.
To preserve Houses from Vermin.
Bugs, in particular, may readily be destroyed by dissolving half a drachm of corrosive sublimate in a quarter of an ounce of spirit of salts, mixing it with one quart of spirit of turpentine.
Shake these well together, dip a brush in it, and wash those places where bugs are supposed to resort, and this will remove them with greater certainty than any other mode now practised. Bees and their Management.
Who should keep Bees.
This is a whole chapter of bread-making in miniature: household loaves, a baker's sponge-and-dough process, potato and rice and bran breads, and a leaven kept from the last batch. Nearly all of it is written to bakehouse scale, so the first job is arithmetic.
- Scale before anything elseA peck of flour is a quarter bushel, roughly 12-14 lb; a bushel is about 50-60 lb; a baker's sack in this period was 280 lb. These are bakehouse quantities: the peck receipt here is divided into four large loaves, and the bushel and sack receipts run to many times that. Divide by eight or ten to get a batch a home mixer or a pair of hands can manage.
- The quartern loafA quartern is generally explained as a quarter of a peck of flour, about 3.5 lb, which is just what this receipt does in dividing a peck into four; it baked into a loaf of roughly 4 lb. "Four quartern loaves for family use" is around 16 lb of finished bread, which tells you how much of a household's calories came from the loaf.
- Yeast is the substitution that mattersAle yeast, barm and small-beer yeast are living brewery sediment, far weaker and more variable than modern yeast, so a substitution has to be scaled to the flour you actually use and judged by the dough rather than by a fixed equivalent for a quart of barm. Expect faster rises than the four-hour figures given.
- The very-small-quantity methodThat one teaspoonful of thick yeast built up in stages over roughly eleven hours is a sponge, the same principle as a modern preferment. It works because each addition of warm water and flour feeds a growing population. Keep the sponge between 75 and 80F or the schedule stretches out unpredictably.
- Temperature figuresThe 90F given for the London bakers' liquor is unusually precise for the period and is worth keeping: it is the temperature at which barm works briskly without being killed. "Milk warm" and "scalding hot" elsewhere mean about blood heat and near boiling respectively; in the French bread receipt the scalding milk-and-water is tempered by the gallon of water the yeast has stood in overnight before the two are combined.
- Oven heatThese loaves were baked in a cooling brick oven. In a modern oven, a quick oven is 425-450F, dropping to about 375-400F for the bulk of the bake on large loaves. The quarter of an hour a side in the French bread receipt assumes small loaves turned on a hearth, not tins.
- Potato and rice breadsThe 7 lb flour to 3 lb potato ratio is high but sound: cooked potato holds water and keeps the crumb soft for days. Mash the potato while hot and mix it in warm, as directed, or it lumps. Rice must be boiled to a genuine pulp; undercooked grains give hard specks in the crumb.
- Leaven breadThis is sourdough by another name: two pounds of yesterday's risen dough held under flour until it sours. It works, but a piece kept at room temperature for a full day in a warm kitchen can go sharply acetic. The note that fresher leaven tastes less sour is the whole of the technique.
- The bran-liquor claimBoiling coarse bran and kneading with the pressed liquor will not yield one-third more bread. It adds water-soluble solids and some flavour, nothing more; the extra weight is water. Bran breads here are better judged as what they are, coarse loaves that need a little more liquid than white dough.
- The adulteration testAlum was a genuine and widespread bakers' additive in the early nineteenth century, while bone-dust and plaster of Paris were staples of period exposés and public alarm rather than well-documented practice; this entry is a consumer-protection note rather than a cooking instruction. The hot-knife test is not reliable by modern analytical standards and has no application to flour sold today.
Mackenzie's compilation belongs to the decades when British bread was both the largest item in a working household's budget and the most notoriously adulterated food on sale; the alum, chalk and bone-dust tests printed here echo a public argument that ran from the 1750s through the Adulteration of Food Acts of the 1860s. The potato, rice and bran loaves are artefacts of grain scarcity and high wheat prices under and after the Corn Laws, when stretching a peck of flour with cheaper starch was ordinary economy rather than novelty baking. The London bakers' method is a straightforward sponge-and-dough process, the professional standard of the trade, set down for householders who wanted bakery-quality bread without the bakery's suspected additives, and the entry on making bread from a single teaspoonful of yeast reflects a period when barm had to be begged or bought from a brewer and could not be relied on to be fresh.