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White Bread (Sponge Method cake)
Sponge Method 1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1/2 quarts lukewarm water tablespoonfuls sugar 2 and one-half hours.
Mould into loaves. Place in well- Scald one and one-half pints milk; dis-greased bread pans, filling them half solve 1 cake compressed yeast in twothirds cupful lukewarm water; add two tablespoonfuls sugar; sift two sifters of flour in mixing bowl. When milk is lukewarm, add one large tablespoonful salt; add dissolved yeast to milk; make well in center of flour, and add milk.
Stir with mixing spoon until flour is all taken up, then turn out on board and knead well for twenty minutes. Return to bowl and let raise in warm place, well covered. This will take from two to three hours. When sufficiently risen, punch down and let stand for three-quarters of an hour longer (doubled in bulk). Mold into loaves or rolls, handling the dough very gently. Put in well-greased pans, let raise and bake. Rolls should raise at least one-half hour and loaves one hour. Bake rolls twenty-five minutes and loaves one hour in wood or coal range, or forty-five minutes in gas range.
If desired to make this bread over night, use only one tablespoonful sugar and one and one-half tablespoonfuls of salt.
Bread made by this method can be set at seven o'clock in the morning and should be out of the oven by noon.
If desired to make bread at night, use method as above at night just before retiring, and in the morning dough will be ready to put into pans; let raise and bake. If dough is made into loaves at seven in the morning, it should be baked by nine o'clock.
A straight-dough white bread scaled for a household that baked several loaves at once. The instructions assume a cook who knows what risen dough looks like, so the useful work here is pinning down quantities, yeast and oven heat.
- The flour quantity"Two sifters of flour" is not a fixed measure; sifter capacities varied. With about 3 2/3 cups of total liquid (1 1/2 pints milk plus 2/3 cup water), expect somewhere in the region of 10-11 cups of flour. Add it to the point where the dough is soft but no longer sticky rather than trusting a number.
- The yeastA cake of compressed yeast is usually reckoned at about 0.6 oz, though cake sizes varied, and is commonly substituted with one modern packet, 2 1/4 teaspoons, of active dry yeast. Dissolve it in the 2/3 cup lukewarm water as written; lukewarm here means blood heat, not hot.
- Scalding the milkScalding is generally said to deactivate components of raw milk that weaken gluten; with pasteurised milk it is usually treated as unnecessary. Do not add the yeast until the milk has cooled or you will kill it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because ranges had none. Bake loaves at 400F for the first 15 minutes, then 375F for the remainder; rolls go straight in at 400F. The recipe gives an hour for loaves in a wood or coal range but 45 minutes in a gas range, and 25 minutes for rolls; a loaf is done at an internal 195-205F and sounds hollow when tapped.
- KneadingTwenty minutes by hand is honest for this volume of dough, but 8-10 minutes in a stand mixer with the dough hook, in two batches, does the same work. Stop when the dough pulls into a smooth ball and passes a windowpane test.
- The risesTwo to three hours for the first rise reflects a cool kitchen and a modest amount of yeast. In a 70F room expect closer to 1 1/2 hours. Judge by volume, not the clock: the second rest after punching down should double the dough regardless of the three-quarters of an hour quoted.
- The overnight versionCutting the sugar to one tablespoon and raising the salt slows fermentation so the dough survives eight hours unattended. A cold kitchen was assumed; in a modern heated house, use the refrigerator overnight and let the dough come back to room temperature before shaping.
- YieldThis quantity makes roughly two or three 9x5 inch loaves, or two loaves and a pan of rolls. Fill greased pans no more than half full and let them rise to just above the rim.
Fleischmann's compressed yeast is the reason this recipe reads as it does: before it, American home bakers relied on saved sponge, hop yeast or a potato ferment, and bread was an all-day project begun the night before. The company promoted its product hard through recipe leaflets, which is why a brand name sits in the ingredient line of a book otherwise written in generic terms. The two schedules given here, morning-set and night-set, are a selling point as much as an instruction, arguing that reliable yeast let a cook choose when to bake. The heading calls this the sponge method, though the procedure as written is a straight dough with all the flour added at once; the page text here is visibly garbled, so the mismatch between heading and method may be a transcription artefact.