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The Hotel Book of Breads

All the Mystery that Pertains to Yeast.

Stout Party: "What delicious bread you have Who is your baker?" Brillat-Savarin: "Limet, in Rue de Richelieu He supplies the royal family; but I send there because it is near, and continue doing so because I have proclaimed him to be the first bread-maker in the world" Stout Party: "I must take a note of his address I am a great eater of bread, and with such rolls as those I could almost dispense with everything else." It is one of the most natural occurrences in the world, when traveling hotel patrons stop at a good hotel--no matter what the rate per day if situated in the midst of the land of sweet butter--and find on the table hot rolls that are remarkably light, well-baked, well-shaped, thin-crusted, soft, white, sweet, fine-grained, delicious and just splendid; so that they think they "could almost dispense with everything else;" for them to ask somebody as a special favor to procure them the receipt to make them by. But, more's the pity, they seldom derive any benefit from the reply; not only because the ingredients are but seldom weighed or measured, and the pastry cook may be unable and unwilling to supply the information, but because in the nature of the case the receipt is but a small part of a little system of bread-making that has to be faithfully followed from small beginnings to great results, if uniformly fine rolls and bread are to be produced; and that little system is yet so large that it cannot be explained quite all in a minute. Happily however, bread-making is not a very complicated affair compared with other branches of cookery where each new article may require a different method, but this once learned becomes little more than a matter of routine. The first step is making the yeast.