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Second Part. Stock Yeast
The bottle having stood long enough-or two days after corking it down-make about 2 gallons of hop tea by putting a pail of water into a kettle with a lot of hops-nearly a pound-and boiling them about an hour with a lid on the kettle. Put 2 pounds of flour into a large jar, pan, or keg and strain some of the boiling hop water into it-enough to wet and scald the flour thoroughly when stirred up; when there are no more lumps in the flour strain in all the rest of the hop water and cool it with a piece of ice. After that put in a quart of coarse ground malt and 1/2 pound of sugar. When this mixture is no more than milk warm take the bottle yeast, hold the neck downwards and carefully draw the cork-which will come out like the cork from a bottle of champagne-and mix the two together. Set the jar or keg containing the stock in a warm corner where it may ferment undisturbed, and in a day and a half or two days afterwards the stock will be ready to start ferment with, as has already been directed at number 512.
It is not necessary to make the bottle yeast every time that stock is made, for new stock may be started with some of the old stock remaining, but whenever the ferment seems weak and slow, and whenever the bread begins to turn sour before it is light, then new stock should be started from the very foundation, in the bottle.
It may be observed that the above method renders a person who can get the raw materials quite independent of every other person's yeast and of any other kind of yeast to start with He makes his own from the very first germ.
This is the second stage of a two-part leaven: a champagne-corked bottle of self-started yeast is used to inoculate a large tub of hopped, malted flour batter, which then becomes the bakery's working ferment. The quantities are commercial, and almost everything hinges on temperature.
- The hinge: milk warm means about 95-100FThe hinge: milk warm means roughly blood heat, in the region of 95-100F -- Boiling hop water scalds the flour; the yeast goes in only after the mash has cooled. Much above 110F the culture suffers and by about 130F it is killed, and a batch pitched too hot will not rise. The original cools the mash with a piece of ice.
- A pail of waterGenuinely ambiguous. Household pails of the period varied, commonly somewhere in the region of two to three gallons, and the recipe's stated target of about two gallons of hop tea after an hour of covered boiling suggests the larger end. Work backwards from the finished volume rather than trusting the pail.
- Nearly a pound of hopsThat is a bakery quantity for two gallons and gives a bitter, strongly antiseptic tea. Whole dried hops were meant; modern pellets are more concentrated by weight and the quantity would need reducing.
- Coarse ground maltCrushed malted barley, not malt extract or malted milk powder. Its function is enzymatic, converting starch in the flour to fermentable sugar, so diastatic malt is required; kilned dark malts will not do the work.
- VesselsA jar, pan or keg here means an open or loosely covered crock or wooden keg of several gallons. Any modern equivalent must be scalded clean before use, since two days of warm undisturbed fermentation will happily grow whatever else is present.
- The reference to number 512An internal cross-reference to an earlier numbered section of the book, where the stock is put to work as the ferment. It is not part of this procedure.
- Warm cornerSimply a warm spot; the recipe gives no temperature. Cooler conditions will stretch the day-and-a-half to two-day window out considerably.
- Souring is the signalThe instruction to start again from the bottle when bread turns sour before it is light is sound. Repeated back-slopping lets lactic and acetic bacteria outcompete the yeast, and no amount of feeding will reverse it.
- ScaleThis makes something over two gallons of liquid leaven, a bakery quantity rather than a domestic one. A domestic cook would need to scale it down sharply.
Before reliable packaged yeast, a baker's independence rested on keeping a living stock, and the American baking manuals of the later nineteenth century devote long sections to raising one from nothing: a bottle of spontaneously fermented liquid, then a hopped flour-and-malt mash built up from it, then the daily ferment. Hops are the key to the system's practicality, since their resins suppress many bacteria while leaving yeast unharmed, which is why hop-yeast and hop-rising bread recipes appear all through American cookery from the early 1800s onward. The author's closing boast about making his own from the very first germ is a period sentiment with teeth: bakers who bought brewer's barm depended on a nearby brewery's schedule and its quality, and a soured stock could shut a shop. Compressed cake yeast, generally traced to Fleischmann's promotion of Vienna-style baking in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s, would eventually make this whole apparatus optional, though pages like this one persisted in trade manuals long after.