Yeast, Kirkleatham
INGREDIENTS.-2 oz. of hops, 4 quarts of water, 1/2 lb. of flour, pint of yeast.
Bottle Boil the hops and water for 20 minutes; strain, and mix with the liquid 1/21 lb. of flour and not quite pint of yeast. it up, and tie the corks down. When wanted for use, boil potatoes according to the quantity of bread to be made (about 3 lbs. are sufficient for about a peck of flour); mash them, add to them 1/2 lb. of flour, and mix about 1/2 pint of the yeast with them let this mixture stand all day, and lay the bread to rise the night before it is wanted.
TIME.-20 minutes to boil the hops and water.
YORKSHIRE PUDDING.
SUFFICIENT.- pint of this yeast sufficient for a peck of flour, or rather more. Yorkshire Pudding. (To Serve with Hot Roast Beef.) - INGREDIENTS for pudding for 6 persons.-1½ pint of milk, 6 large tablespoonfuls of flour, 3 eggs, 1 saltspoonful of salt. AVERAGE COST, 7d. Put the flour into a basin with the salt, and stir gradually to this enough milk to make it into a stiff batter. When this is perfectly smooth, and all the lumps are well rubbed down, add the remainder of the milk and the eggs, which should be well beaten. Beat the mixture for a few minutes, and pour it into a shallow tin, which YORKSHIRE PUDDING. has been previously well rubbed with beef dripping. Put the pudding into the oven, and bake it for an hour; then, for another 1/2 hour place it under the meat, to catch a little of the gravy that flows from it. Cut the pudding into small square pieces, put them on a hot dish, and serve. If the meat is baked, the pudding may be placed under it, after the meat has cooked some time and the dripping has been poured off, resting the meat on a small three-cornered stand. TIME.-1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Yorkshire Pudding. (An Economical Way of Making.) - INGREDIENTS for pudding for 6 persons.-2 breakfastcupfuls of flour, a teaspoonful of salt, rather more than 1 pint of water, 2 eggs. AVERAGE CosT, 4d.
Put the flour in a basin with the salt, and mix them well together. Make a hole in the centre and break into it the eggs, then gradually add the water, beating it well in and being careful not to leave lumps. When a fairly stiff batter, it is ready. Take the meat tin from the oven, where the meat should have quite half cooked, pour off the dripping and raise the meat, after basting well, on a trivet. Pour in the pudding and put back in the oven with as little delay as possible. Serve cut in squares on a hot dish.
TIME.-1 to 1½ hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
WARD, LOCK AND CO., LIMITED, LONDON, NEW YORK, AND MELBOURNE.
Two quite different things sit on this page: a home-made hop-and-potato barm for raising bread, and two versions of Yorkshire pudding baked in the dripping tin. Both belong to a kitchen where the bread rose overnight and the roast hung above the batter.
- What the yeast actually isThis is a barm, not a dried yeast: hop tea plus flour, kept alive by an existing pint of yeast and later fed with mashed potato. It depends on the starting yeast being live; the recipe assumes baker's or brewer's yeast of the period rather than anything from a modern packet.
- Peck of flourA peck of flour is a dry measure of two gallons, roughly 12 to 14 lb depending on how it is filled. So the barm is scaled for a baking of four or five large loaves, not a single one.
- Bottling live fermentCorking and tying down a bottle of active yeast builds pressure. If you keep a barm now, hold it in a jar with a loose lid in the refrigerator and use it within a few days.
- HopsTwo ounces of hops to four quarts of water gives a strongly bitter, mildly antiseptic liquor that discourages spoilage bacteria while the yeast works. Whole dried hop flowers from a brewing supplier are the closest thing to what is meant here.
- Potato stageAbout 3 lb of potatoes, boiled and mashed with flour and a little of the yeast, make a sponge that both feeds the ferment and goes into the bread. The mixture stands all day, then the dough is set to rise overnight, so allow roughly 24 hours from starting the potatoes to baking.
- Yorkshire pudding ovenNeither pudding gives a temperature; both assume the tin sitting in the same oven as a roast. The times are long by modern practice, where a shallow tin of this batter is usually done in 20 to 30 minutes in a hot oven; baked for an hour it will be denser and closer in texture.
- Under the meatPlacing the pudding beneath the joint for the last half hour is the point of the older version: it catches the gravy that flows from the meat. The recipe itself is headed 'To Serve with Hot Roast Beef'.
- BreakfastcupfulsIn the economical version, a breakfastcup is about 8 to 10 fl oz, so two cupfuls of flour is roughly 8 to 10 oz by weight. The recipe calls the result a fairly stiff batter.
- YieldEach pudding is given as sufficient for six, cut into squares. The milk version is richer and browns faster; the water-and-two-egg version is the plainer of the two, at 4d. against 7d.
Kirkleatham is a village in the North Riding of Yorkshire, and the yeast named for it belongs to the long tradition of household barms kept going from one baking to the next, before compressed yeast and then dried yeast made a starter unnecessary. Hops were used in such barms as much for their preservative bitterness as for flavour, keeping the ferment sweet for a few weeks in a cold larder. That the yeast recipe and Yorkshire pudding share a page is a coincidence of alphabetical arrangement, but a fitting one: both are the domestic economy of a northern kitchen, where nothing that dripped from a roast was allowed to go to waste. It is often said that the pudding was served first, with gravy, so that less beef would be wanted afterwards, though this page's recipe directs otherwise, 'To Serve with Hot Roast Beef'.