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Self-Rising Bread
1/2 cup cornmeal 1/2 cup scalded milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups milk and water 2 1/2 cups flour 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt Flour to make a stiff dough Scald the meal and salt with one-half cup of milk, and let it stand in a warm place over night. In the morning, set the bowl in water, as warm as the hand can bear. During the whole process keep the bread at this temperature; when this is light, add it to the remainder of the scalded milk and water which has been allowed to cool. Add the butter, sugar, salt and flour, and beat this batter thoroughly. Set it in warm water again to rise; when light, add the flour to make a stiff dough, knead well, put in pans, and when risen again, bake for about 45 minutes.
Despite the name, this is not a soda bread and there is no baking powder in it. It is a salt-rising loaf: the cornmeal mush left overnight in a warm place is the leaven, and everything else depends on it working.
- The hinge: hold the temperatureThe wild fermentation that raises this bread works between roughly 100F and 115F and stalls or sours outside that band. The instruction to set the bowl in water "as warm as the hand can bear" and keep it there through the whole process is the entire technique — a turned-off oven with a pan of hot water, a cooler with warm water, or a proofing box all do the job better than a kitchen counter.
- Cornmeal mattersUse stone-ground or whole-grain cornmeal, ideally not long off the shelf. Modern degerminated, heat-treated supermarket meal is often blamed when a salt-rising starter fails to lift, though results vary.
- Two salt entries, not a misprintThe half teaspoon is scalded with the meal overnight; the full teaspoon goes into the dough in the morning. Keep them separate.
- "The remainder of the scalded milk"Read this as the 2 cups of milk and water, scalded and then cooled to blood heat before it meets the risen starter. Anything hotter kills the ferment. The half cup listed first is used up in the overnight mush.
- Flour quantity is open-endedThe 2 1/2 cups goes into the beaten batter; the "flour to make a stiff dough" is additional and the recipe does not say how much. Add it gradually — the dough should be firm but still tacky.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 375F for the stated 45 minutes; the loaf is done at an internal 200F to 205F.
- Expect long, unpredictable risesSalt-rising dough is slower and less vigorous than yeast dough. Each stage may take two to four hours, and the loaf will rise less in the pan than a commercial-yeast bread. Judge by doubling in bulk, never by the clock.
- The smellThe starter and the rising dough give off a pungent cheesy odour that alarms first-time bakers. It is characteristic of the style and bakes out into the loaf's distinctive flavour; a starter that smells of nothing after 12 hours has simply failed and should be discarded.
- YieldNot stated. The recipe says "pans," plural.
Salt-rising bread — leavened without yeast by holding a scalded grain mush at body heat until it ferments — is an American mountain and frontier bread, associated with Appalachia, Kentucky and the Ohio Valley, and it appears in cookbooks throughout the nineteenth century when commercial yeast was neither cheap nor reliable. The origin of the name is uncertain: one common explanation is the practice of bedding the starter jar in a box of warm salt to hold its temperature overnight, but this is folk tradition rather than documented, and other accounts point simply to the salt in the mixture. Its rise comes from bacterial rather than yeast fermentation, which is why it demands so much more warmth and patience and why the finished crumb is close, fine and faintly cheesy instead of open and beery. The loaf needs no yeast cake from the store, and a dense, well-flavoured bread carried a good deal of the weight in meals built around vegetables, cheese and eggs.