Home › Bread And Bread Making › Water Bread
Water Bread
2 cups boiling water. 1 tablespoon butter. 1 tablespoon lard. 2 tablespoons sugar. 2½ teaspoons salt ¼ yeast cake dissolved in ¼ cup lukewarm water 6 cups sifted flour Put butter, lard, sugar, and salt in bread raiser, or large bowl without a lip; pour on boiling water; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake and five cups of flour; then stir until thoroughly mixed, using a knife or mixing-spoon. Add remaining flour, mix, and turn on a floured board, leaving a clean bowl; knead until mixture is smooth, elastic to touch, and bubbles may be seen under the surface. Some practice is required to knead quickly, but the motion once acquired will never be forgotten. Return to bowl, cover with a clean cloth kept for the purpose, and board or tin cover; let rise over night in temperature of 65° F. In morning cut down: this is accomplished by cutting through and turning over dough several times with a case knife, and checks fermentation for a short time; dough may be again raised, and recut down if it is not convenient to shape into loaves or biscuits after first cutting. When properly cared for, bread need never sour. Toss on board slightly floured, knead, shape into loaves or biscuits, place in greased pans, having pans nearly half full. Cover, let rise again to double its bulk, and bake in hot oven. (See Baking of Bread and Time-Table for Baking.) This recipe will make a double loaf of bread and pan of biscuit. Cottolene, crisco, or beef drippings may be used for shortening, one-third less being required. Bread shortened with butter has a good flavor, but is not as white as when lard is used.
A plain overnight white loaf from the era when compressed yeast came in cakes and kitchens ran cold. The ingredient list as printed here is incomplete — the liquid, shortening and sugar are missing — so treat the method, not the header, as the useful part.
- The printed ingredients are garbledOnly salt, yeast and flour are listed, yet the method calls for butter, lard, sugar and boiling water. The complete recipe in the book supplies boiling water, butter and lard and sugar alongside these, but the exact amounts are not recoverable from what is printed on this page.
- "4 yeast cake"Almost certainly a mangled ¼ yeast cake, which matches the ¼ cup of water it is dissolved in. Compressed yeast cakes varied in size (the familiar Fleischmann's cake was about 0.6 oz), so a quarter cake is a very small amount — on the order of half a teaspoon of modern instant dry yeast. That small dose is what makes a slow overnight rise practical; four whole cakes would over-ferment the dough long before morning.
- 65°F overnightThe temperature is part of the recipe, not incidental. A modern kitchen at 70–75°F will ferment this dough faster than intended. A cool room or an unheated pantry is closer to what Farmer assumed.
- "Cut down" and the case knifeCutting down is what we call knocking back or punching down: a case knife is an ordinary table knife, and slicing through the risen dough and folding it over degasses it and slows fermentation. The instruction to cut down twice is a delay tactic for a cook who cannot get to shaping.
- Bread raiser without a lipThe book does not say why a lip is unwanted; a lipless, straight-sided bowl or a lidded dough bucket lets the dough be turned out cleanly, which is what the recipe's "leaving a clean bowl" is after. The board or tin cover is there to keep a crust from forming.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no Fahrenheit figure and refers you to its own Baking of Bread and Time-Table for Baking. A period "hot oven" for bread is generally read as somewhere around 400°F, with a large loaf needing the longer end of the baking time. Modern practice is to take a loaf to about 200°F at the centre.
- CottoleneA commercial shortening of cottonseed oil blended with beef fat, sold in the later nineteenth century and long discontinued; it was not hydrogenated, though Crisco, the other fat named, was. Any solid vegetable shortening substitutes.
- Pans half fullFilling the tins nearly half and letting the dough double gives a loaf that finishes just proud of the rim. Overfilled tins on a long overnight ferment collapse in the oven.
- YieldOne double loaf plus a pan of biscuits, as the recipe states; how that divides among modern tins depends on how you shape it.
Water bread is the baseline loaf of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, set against milk bread, entire wheat bread and the rest: water rather than scalded milk gives a leaner crumb, a crisper crust and a loaf that stales faster but costs less. Its overnight, quarter-cake method belongs to the moment when reliable commercial compressed yeast had reached American grocers and home bakers no longer had to keep a ferment alive between bakings — the cook's job shifted from managing a culture to managing temperature, which is why 65°F is written into the instructions as firmly as the flour is. The aside that butter-shortened bread tastes better but looks less white is a small window on period taste, when a bright white crumb was itself a mark of quality, and the promise that "bread need never sour" is Farmer's whole pedagogical argument in one line: fermentation is a process to be controlled by measurement, not luck.