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Baker's Milk Bread
Make up the sponge and dough for this the same as for common bread, but use sweet milk instead of water. Its merit is its whiteness, fine grain, and sweetness of taste like French rolls. There are three essential points to be observed. 1. Beat the sponge and dough extremely well, only adding the flour gradually and beating it in. 2. Have the dough as soft as it is possible to knead it well, too soft to keep good shape as loaves apart, and bake the loaves in tin moulds. 3. Put it in to bake after the rolls come out. As it must be of light color outside and browns too easily it can only have a slack oven to bake in Brush over the loaves with milk when done.
This is a set of adjustments to a baker's standard sponge-and-dough white bread rather than a standalone formula, so the working numbers have to come from elsewhere. What it does give you are the three things that make milk bread behave differently from water bread.
- Sponge and dough, in modern termsA sponge is a loose preferment of roughly half the flour, all the liquid for that stage, and the yeast, left to ferment several hours until domed and just beginning to fall. The remaining flour, salt, and any fat are then worked in for the final dough. A bakery of the period may well have set the sponge overnight; an overnight sponge in the refrigerator gives comparable flavor.
- A slack ovenSlack is generally taken to mean the cooling oven, somewhere in the region of 300-325F, though the recipe itself gives no temperature. The instruction to bake after the rolls come out is literal: the bread was slotted into the falling heat so the crust would stay pale.
- Why milk browns fasterMilk brings lactose and extra protein, and lactose is not fermented by baker's yeast, so it survives into the bake and colors the crust quickly. That is the whole reason for the low oven. Expect a longer bake than a water loaf at the same weight, and check the center reads about 195-200F rather than trusting the crust.
- Scald or notNineteenth-century recipes often call for scalded milk. With pasteurized milk there is no food-safety reason to do so, but heating to about 180F and cooling still denatures whey proteins that would otherwise slacken the gluten. If your dough seems unusually sticky and weak, this is why.
- "As soft as it is possible to knead"This is the hinge of the recipe. He wants a dough well past the tidy free-standing stage, which is why it goes into tin moulds; softness is what produces the fine, even grain he is selling. Add flour gradually during beating and stop short of a dough that holds a shape on the bench.
- Beating, not just kneadingBeating the sponge means working air and structure into a batter-like mass with a spoon or the hand, which the machine equivalent is a paddle or dough hook on low for several minutes. Underbeaten sponge gives the coarse open crumb the recipe is trying to avoid.
- Tin mouldsStandard 8.5 x 4.5 inch loaf pans, well greased. A soft dough will need the support, and a lidded pain de mie pan gives a flat-topped, tight-grained loaf, though the recipe says nothing about a flat top.
- The milk washBrushing with milk after baking, while hot, softens the crust and adds a faint sheen. Do it as the loaves come out and turn them onto a rack immediately so the sides do not steam soft.
- YieldNone is given, because the baker scaled from his usual bread formula. Reckon on a dough of about 2 lb for each standard loaf pan.
Milk bread stands as the upmarket line: white, close-grained, faintly sweet, and distinct from the plain water-and-flour loaf. The comparison to French rolls is the selling point of the era, when "French" on a bakery board signified a fine white crumb and a delicate crust. The instruction to bake it after the rolls come out also suggests how a working bakehouse of the period may have been organized: one masonry oven was fired once and then, by most accounts, worked down through a descending sequence of heats, with rolls taking the fierce first heat and the pale, slow-baking goods following as the bricks gave up their stored warmth. Milk is generally thought to have been a comparatively costly and perishable ingredient before refrigerated delivery, so a loaf made entirely with it was likely a deliberate luxury rather than an everyday item.