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4 pounds and 2 ounces of flour 3/4 ounce of yeast 1 3/4 pints of water 1/4 ounce of salt A bread-mixer should be used in making this bread. Best seconds flour is better than superfine flour. The water must be warm, but not too hot to bear the hand in. Dissolve the yeast in the water; add the salt, and stir all well together. Pour the liquid into the bread-mixer. Now add the flour which must be sifted. Fasten the top on the mixer, and turn the handle for exactly three minutes. Remove the cover, and have ready a well-floured pastry-board. Take a large knife and remove the dough from the central screw, divide it into four equal parts, and place each part in a wellgreased bread-tin. Let the tins stand in a warm place for one hour to rise. The plate rack above an ordinary kitchen stove is a good place. Then put them in a very moderately heated oven, and after the first twenty minutes increase the heat until it is hot, but not so hot as is required for pastry. The loaves must bake for an hour. Bread is much better baked in tins; but if tins are not used, the dough must be divided into four, and formed into round cakes and placed on the oven shelves, which must be first floured. Three-quarters of an hour to rise, and the same to bake will then be quite long enough. Great care should be taken in weighing and measuring the quantities.
A plain English tin loaf scaled for a hand-cranked bread mixer, with a single rise and no bulk ferment. The quantities work, but several of the numbers need translating before you start.
- Scale it down first4 lb 2 oz of flour is about 1,870 g and is divided into four loaves of roughly 700 g of dough each. Quartering the recipe (roughly 470 g flour, 250 ml water) gives one loaf and fits an ordinary mixer or a bowl.
- The bread-mixerA cranked tin drum with a central screw-shaped paddle; the recipe allows three minutes of turning in place of kneading. A stand mixer with a dough hook for 6-8 minutes, or 10 minutes by hand, is the nearest substitute.
- Seconds flourA slightly lower-grade wheat flour retaining more of the outer part of the grain than white "superfine" — darker and higher in ash. Strong bread flour with 10-15% wholemeal blended in is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Yeast3/4 oz means fresh compressed yeast, about 21 g. Substitute roughly 7 g (2 1/4 tsp) instant dried yeast, added to the flour rather than dissolved in the water.
- Water and salt1 3/4 imperial pints is just under 1 litre — a hydration near 53%, which is a stiff, close-crumbed dough by modern standards. The 1/4 oz of salt is only about 7 g for the whole batch, well under half what most bakers now use; 2% of flour weight, about 37 g, gives a loaf that tastes seasoned.
- Water temperature"Warm, but not too hot to bear the hand in" suggests something in the region of 100-110F. Yeast begins to die off well above this, from around 130F.
- One rise onlyThe dough goes straight into tins for an hour. That is a fast, lightly flavoured loaf; a 60-90 minute bulk ferment before shaping improves both crumb and taste, and the tinned dough should still double before it goes in.
- Oven, in numbersThe book gives no temperatures; on the usual reckoning "very moderately heated" is somewhere around 325-350F, rising to "hot, but not so hot as for pastry", perhaps 400-425F. Modern practice reverses this: start at 425F for the first 15 minutes to get oven spring, then drop to 375F. A full hour is long for a tin loaf of this size; bake to an internal temperature of 200-210F, usually 35-45 minutes.
- The warm plate rackThe rack above a kitchen range ran warm and served as a proving spot. An oven with only the light on, or a turned-off oven with a pan of hot water, does the same.
Household bread books of this period assume the reader is choosing between the baker's shop and her own oven, and the mechanical bread-mixer — a lidded pail with a cranked spiral paddle — was the argument for baking at home: three minutes of turning instead of a quarter-hour of kneading, and no hands in the dough. The recommendation of "best seconds" over "superfine" flour is the older preference speaking; roller milling had made very white flour cheap, but seconds flour retained more of the wheat and was held to make a sweeter, better-keeping loaf.