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Milk Bread
1 cake compressed yeast 1 tablespoon sugar 1 quart milk, scalded and cooled 3 quarts sifted flour 1 tablespoon lard, melted 1/2 tablespoon salt Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the lukewarm liquid; add one and one half quarts of sifted flour; beat until smooth. Cover and set to rise in warm place, free from draft for about one and one half hours. When light, add lard (or butter), rest of flour, and salt. Knead until smooth and elastic; place in well-greased bowl; cover; let rise again until double in bulk-about two hours. Mold into loaves; place in well-greased bread pans, filling them half full. Cover and let rise again until double in bulk-about one hour. Bake forty to fifty minutes.
This makes three one-and-one-half pound loaves.
A straightforward sponge-and-dough milk bread, with the one thing a modern baker most needs supplied nowhere in the text: an oven temperature.
- Oven temperatureThe original assumes you know your range. Bake at 375F for the stated forty to fifty minutes; loaves this size are done at an internal temperature of 190-200F and should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.
- Compressed yeastOne cake meant roughly 0.6 oz of fresh compressed yeast. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast; with instant you can skip the dissolving step and mix it into the first flour.
- Flour by weightThree quarts of sifted flour is about 12 cups, or roughly 1.4 kg. Sifting mattered because it kept volume measurement consistent and broke up lumps; with modern all-purpose, measure by weight and hold back the last cup or two until the dough tells you it needs it.
- Scalding the milkScalding is usually explained as destroying something in raw milk - enzymes or whey proteins, depending on whom you read - that slackens dough. With pasteurized milk many bakers treat it as optional, though warming to lukewarm still speeds the sponge. Do not add it hot.
- The spongeAdding only half the flour first is deliberate. That loose batter ferments fast and builds flavor; beat it genuinely smooth so the gluten starts developing before the salt and fat go in.
- Salt and fat go in lateSalt slows the yeast and fat coats the gluten, so holding both back lets the sponge work freely. A tablespoon of lard gives a softer crumb and a tender crust; butter works and tastes different, shortening works and tastes of nothing.
- Pans and yieldThree 1 1/2 lb loaves suit standard 9x5-inch pans. Filling them half full is right; the final rise to double brings the dough to about the rim.
- Rising timesThe stated 1 1/2, 2 and 1 hour rises assume a warm kitchen and fresh yeast. Judge by the dough rather than the clock, and if your kitchen is cool expect the second rise in particular to run long.
Milk bread stands in the older cookbooks as an everyday alternative to water bread: milk brings sugar, fat and protein to the dough, giving a softer crumb, a browner crust and a loaf that stales more slowly, which mattered when a household baked once or twice a week rather than daily. The three-stage method here, with a wet sponge set first and the salt and shortening added at the second mixing, was one common American home practice from the late nineteenth century onward, and the same principle survives in commercial baking as the sponge-and-dough process. The compressed yeast cake called for was itself a relatively recent convenience, widely sold from the 1870s onward and generally regarded as an improvement on homemade or salt-rising ferments.