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Raised with Yeast
1 quart of corn meal. 1 quart of graham. 1 quart rye flour. 1 quart white flour. 1 quart of boiling water. 1 pint of yeast. 1 small cup of molasses. 2 teaspoonfuls of salt. 1/2 cup of burnt sugar coloring. The method here recommended is materially different from the common troublesome process; first, because troublesome processes cannot and will not be carried out in hotels doing good business and secondly, because this way produces as good results as if one sat up all night about it. Scald the meal by itself first, by pouring the boiling water on and stirring in a pan. Then add molasses, salt, caramel. If still hot, let it stand a while before adding anything else. When only milk warm strain in the yeast, then mix in the graham and rye and the white flour last. The dough will be like graham dough and can be worked on the table. Part of the white flour should be left over to dust with. After a little kneading, slightly grease the pan it was mixed in, place the dough in it, cover with a cloth and let rise moderately warm about 6 hours. Turn on the table, knead a little, make into 4 or 5 loaves, place in round moulds or pails, let rise about half an hour or an hour if to be baked instead of steamed.
By this method no sponge is set, but the dough is mixed up stiff at once-care being taken not to let the yeast get scalded in the hot meal-greatly lessening the trouble. If commenced in the middle of the day the loaves will be ready for the oven after the rolls at night, and should be baked two or three hours at very moderate heat. Or, mixed at night and made into loaves very early the bread may be baked in time for breakfast. But the best way is this: Make up the dough as directed, at 7 in the morning. Work and make into loaves at 12 or 1. After rising one-half hour set the iron pails containing the loaves in the steam-chest, or in a boiler with water, and steam in this way till 5 30. Then bake one-half hour and serve hot for supper, the remainder answering for cold bread to toast.
When these loaves become hollow in the top it as because of too much rising or proof in the pails. Steaming does not arrest fermentation quick enough and they get too light and fall.
The forogoing is one way that requires good yeast. The next is shorter still and takes baking powder instead. It is hard to say which is the better. You can be happy with either.
This is hotel-scale New England brown bread — five quarts of dry meal and flour, yielding four or five loaves — written for a baker with a steam chest and a cooling oven. A quarter batch behaves the same in a home kitchen.
- The hinge: keep the yeast off the hot mealThe cornmeal is scalded first and must come down to lukewarm (below about 110F) before the yeast goes in, and the author says so twice. If you strain yeast into meal that is still hot you kill it and the dough will never move, whatever the six hours suggest.
- A pint of yeastThis means a pint of liquid yeast of the period -- home-made hop or potato yeast, or brewer's barm -- not anything sold today, and there is no honest one-to-one conversion. Roughly, 2 teaspoons of instant yeast should cover the leavening for the full batch -- but the original was also a pint of liquid, so add about 2 cups of water to keep the dough at the consistency described.
- GrahamWhole wheat flour, coarse-ground. Nineteenth-century graham was closer to modern stone-ground whole wheat than to the fine roller-milled kind; use the coarsest whole wheat you can get.
- Burnt sugar coloringCaramel made by cooking sugar dark and dissolving it in water -- colour, not sweetness; the recipe calls it simply 'caramel' further down. It can be left out or replaced with a little dark molasses; the loaf will simply be paler.
- Round moulds or pailsStraight-sided cylindrical tins, covered, filled about two-thirds. One-pound coffee tins, pudding moulds or clean cans work. For steaming, cover each with foil and set on a rack in a pot with water partway up the sides, lid on, topping up the water as it boils away.
- "Very moderate heat"300 to 325F for the two to three hour oven-baked version. The half hour finish after steaming can go hotter, 350F, since the loaf is already cooked through and only wants a crust.
- Steaming timesThe recipe's schedule (loaves made up at 12 or 1, half an hour's rise, steamed till 5 30) means four to five hours of steaming for large iron pails in a commercial steam chest. Home-sized cans in a pot are done in about 2 to 2 1/2 hours; the loaf is set when a skewer comes out clean and the surface is dry to the touch.
- Why the tops go hollowThe explanation given is sound. Steam heats the loaf too gently to stop fermentation fast, so an over-proofed dough keeps expanding and then collapses. Give the filled moulds the shorter half hour rise, not the hour, when they are going into steam.
This is the New England "thirded" bread -- corn, rye and wheat together -- of the kind many nineteenth-century books call Boston brown bread, here stretched to four grains and scaled for a hotel dining room. The combination is generally traced to colonial households where wheat was the expensive grain and cornmeal and rye were not, and the steaming method to the same kitchens' habit of cooking in a kettle rather than heating a brick oven for one loaf. By the time this book was written many published brown breads had gone over to saleratus or baking powder, which may be why the author bothers to label this one "raised with yeast" and follows it immediately with a chemically leavened version. The whole passage is really an argument about labour: a hotel baker could not set a sponge and sit up with it, so the dough is mixed stiff in one operation and slotted into the day's existing rhythm, into the oven after the evening rolls and out in time for supper.