Home › Fireless Cookery › Bread (Cake compressed yeast)
Bread (Cake compressed yeast)
1 cake compressed yeast 1 tablespoon lukewarm water 3 quarts flour 2 tablespoons lard Boil the potatoes in the water. When thoroughly done, mash; add salt and sugar. Dissolve the yeast cake in lukewarm water; mix potato water and yeast together; place this in small aluminum dish and leave over night in the cooker, so as to keep it warm and out of drafts. In the morning rub the lard into the flour; add the yeast; mix down, adding enough flour to make it stiff; place this in large aluminum pail and put it into the cooker to rise. When light, cut into loaves; work down smooth and put in the large aluminum vessel. Have the radiators hot and use them just the same as when roasting beef.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe, and the ingredient list printed with it is incomplete — potatoes, water, salt and sugar all appear in the method but never in the list. Read the method first and assemble accordingly.
- The missing ingredientsReckon on 2 medium potatoes boiled in about 1 quart of water, roughly 1 tablespoon salt and 1 to 2 tablespoons sugar for 3 quarts of flour. The potato water is the liquid for the dough; save all of it and cool it to lukewarm before it meets the yeast.
- Compressed yeastOne cake of compressed yeast is about 0.6 oz of fresh yeast, equivalent to roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Fresh cake yeast still exists but is a special order in most places.
- One tablespoon of water is not enoughThe tablespoon of lukewarm water is only for slaking the yeast cake into a smooth cream. The bulk of the liquid is the potato water, which must be lukewarm — hot potato water will kill the yeast outright.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated box holding heavy soapstone or iron discs (the "radiators") heated on the stove until they glow, then dropped in with the food. It is a heat-retention cooker: no thermostat, no top-up. The overnight sponge stage here uses only residual warmth, not hot radiators.
- The radiators for baking"Have the radiators hot and use them just the same as when roasting beef" points to preheated discs used as they would be for a roast. Baking bread this way is unreliable without the original apparatus; a hot oven, around 400F for 30 to 40 minutes, until the loaves sound hollow, is the practical substitute.
- Flour quantityThree quarts of flour is about 3 lb, or roughly 11 to 12 cups, and yields three to four ordinary loaves. Hold back the last cup or two and add only what the dough needs.
- Aluminium vesselsThe recipe specifies aluminium dishes and pails but does not say why. Any heavy pan or bowl works for the sponge; use standard loaf tins for the final rise and bake.
- Timing the overnight spongeThe sponge stands overnight in the cooker, which at room temperature is simply a draught-free box. If your kitchen is warm, an 8-hour rise may overshoot; a cool spot on the counter is the modern equivalent.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and the 1920s, promoted as a fuel saver and a way to leave food unattended: you brought the pot to the boil on the range, then sealed it in a hay- or asbestos-lined box where it finished on its own heat. The better models added soapstone or iron "radiators" heated red on the stove, which pushed the box into genuine baking and roasting territory — hence the instruction here to treat the bread like a beef roast. Potato bread of this kind is older than the gadget; the mashed potato and its cooking water feed the yeast and hold moisture, giving a softer crumb and a loaf that stales more slowly, which mattered when baking day came once a week. Its appearance in a cook book of the period reflects the era's enthusiasm for domestic-science efficiency, where the cook was expected to account for fuel as carefully as for flour.