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White Bread in Bread-Mixer
1 quart boiled water or milk 1 tablespoon lard 1 tablespoon sugar 1/2 tablespoon salt 1 cake compressed yeast 3 quarts flour Put salt, sugar and lard in the bread-mixer; pour on boiling water or scalded milk and when lukewarm stir in the yeast cake dissolved in a little warm water. Add the flour; put on the lid; turn for three minutes and let rise over night. In the morning turn the handle a few times; lift the dough out on a molding board; divide into four parts and shape into loaves. Place in greased pans, having the pans only half full. Cover with a clean cloth; let rise to twice their bulk and bake for about fifty minutes in a moderate oven.
A straight overnight white bread built for a crank-handled dough mixer, the kitchen appliance of the 1900s middle-class household. It works perfectly well in a stand mixer or by hand, but the quantities need translating first.
- The bread-mixerA tin pail with a lid and a geared dough hook turned by a crank, clamped to the table. Three minutes of cranking does not correspond exactly to any modern figure; a few minutes on a stand mixer's dough hook, or a short hand kneading, is the nearest equivalent.
- Flour by volumeThree quarts of flour is roughly 12 cups, about 3 lb / 1.4 kg. With a quart (4 cups) of liquid that works out at roughly 65 percent hydration; hold back a cup or so of flour and add it only if the dough is slack, since period flour absorbed differently from modern bread flour.
- Compressed yeastA cake of compressed yeast was commonly around 0.6 oz, though period sizes varied; treat it as roughly equivalent to 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast. For an overnight rise at room temperature that is generous; halve it if your kitchen is warm, or the dough may over-ferment and smell sour by morning.
- ScaldingMilk was scalded because unscalded milk was held to weaken the dough, an effect now usually attributed to whey proteins rather than enzymes. Pasteurised milk needs no scalding, though it should still be warmed. Either way, the liquid must be lukewarm, under 110F, before the yeast goes in.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Fifty minutes suits loaves of this size (about 1 1/4 lb each from this quantity) in a standard pan; they are done at an internal temperature of 190-200F and should sound hollow when tapped from the tin.
- LardOne tablespoon in four loaves is a token amount for softness and keeping quality. Butter, shortening or a neutral oil substitutes directly.
- Overnight riseThe dough is meant to sit in a cool kitchen, not a heated one. If your house stays above 70F, refrigerate the covered mixer bowl overnight and let the dough come back to room temperature before shaping.
- YieldFour standard loaves, which is why the recipe is scaled to a mixer. Halve everything for two if you have no use for that much bread at once.
Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the loose-leaf cookery era, when publishers sold ring-bound volumes so a cook could add, remove and reorder pages. The bread-mixer itself was a fixture of American kitchens from the 1890s into the 1920s: a lidded tin pail with a crank-driven dough hook, sold on the promise that no hand need touch the dough. That selling point is often read as speaking to a period newly anxious about bacteria and household cleanliness, and it appealed equally to cooks who simply did not want to knead 3 lb of flour before breakfast. The overnight sponge-free method here, with all the flour added at once and a long cool rise, was one of the approaches in circulation before commercially standardised yeast and short-rise recipes reshaped home baking in the 1920s and 30s, alongside the widely printed sponge-and-dough methods.