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Gems, Muffins, Rolls, Toast and Waffles
OME MADE YEAST (with Hops) - Grate six raw potatoes and mix with one cup of brown sugar, two tablespoons of salt and two quarts of flour. Add enough water to make a batter as thick as that used for griddle cakes.
Take as many hops as can be held in the hand, put them in a saucepan and pour over them two quarts of boiling water. Let them boil for five minutes. Strain off the water, and, while hot, add it to the batter. When lukewarm add a cup of yeast or a yeast cake. Let stand several hours in a warm place until it rises, or the top is covered with little bubbles. Place in glass preserve jars and keep in a cool place.
HOME MADE YEAST (without Hops) - Grate four good-sized potatoes and stir into a quart of boiling water. Let boil five minutes, stirring constantly. When cool add one cake of compressed yeast dissolved in one-half cup of cool water. Turn the mixture into a stone or glass receptacle and let stand in a warm place for four hours, stirring down each time it rises to the top. When fermentation has entirely ceased, cover jar closely and keep in cool place. In winter this yeast will keep in a cool place for three weeks. In summer about ten days. A cup of this yeast, used in making a sponge over night, will make four loaves of bread. Save a half-cup of this yeast to start the next brewing. BREAD-One quart of sweet milk, scalded. A teaspoon salt, one heaping tablespoon sugar and one-half cake of compressed yeast. Dissolve the yeast in a cup of warm water and stir in sufficient flour to make a thin batter. Let stand for about a half-hour, or until it has risen. Stir in enough flour to mold, knead ten minutes and cover closely. Let stand in a warm place over night. In the morning, knead again, mold into loaves and let stand to rise until light. Bake from forty-five to sixty minutes.
Three linked procedures: two potato-and-yeast starters for keeping a household in leaven, and a straight overnight milk bread that uses one. The bread is entirely reproducible; the starters are a period workaround that modern packaged yeast makes unnecessary.
- The starters need a starterBoth yeast recipes begin with a cup of existing yeast or a yeast cake, so neither is a wild ferment. They are propagation media for extending a purchased yeast, which is why they were worth the trouble then and are not now. A modern equivalent is a flour-and-water sourdough starter, kept refrigerated and fed weekly.
- Keeping and safety of the wet yeastA slurry of grated potato, sugar and flour held at room temperature and then "a cool place" is the sort of low-acid, high-starch medium that can pick up unwanted bacteria; the book's own three weeks in winter and ten days in summer tell you the icebox was barely cold. If you want to try it, treat it as a short-lived experiment, keep it refrigerated, and discard it if it smells cheesy, acetone-sharp or off rather than yeasty.
- HopsWhole dried hop cones, sold for brewing. A handful is only a fraction of an ounce, perhaps 1/4 to 1/2 oz. They contribute bitterness and, more to the point, antibacterial resins that helped suppress spoilage organisms in the old wet yeasts.
- Compressed yeastFresh cake yeast, still sold in some markets in 0.6 oz cubes. Half a cake for the bread is about 1 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Fresh yeast is dissolved in warm liquid; instant can go straight into the flour.
- Scalded milkBring the milk to just below a simmer, then cool to lukewarm before it meets the yeast. Scalding was originally about killing raw-milk bacteria, but it also denatures a whey protein that otherwise slackens the dough, so it is still worth doing with pasteurised milk.
- Flour quantityNone is given. A quart of milk plus a cup of water is a lot of liquid and will take a great deal of flour, on the order of 13 to 15 cups of bread flour, for a dough that clears the bowl; add it gradually and stop while the dough is still slightly tacky.
- The overnight rise"A warm place over night" in an unheated kitchen was cool by modern standards. At today's 70F room temperature this dough may over-ferment and go sour and slack in eight hours; refrigerating it overnight and letting it warm an hour before shaping is the safer course.
- Oven heat and yieldNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F; forty-five to sixty minutes suits large loaves, and the interior should read 200F. Expect four or so loaves from the quart of milk.
Before packaged yeast was reliable and cheap, a household's bread depended on keeping a living leaven alive on the shelf, and potato water was one common vehicle for it in nineteenth-century American cookery: the starch feeds the yeast, and the mash holds it in suspension. Hops came into these recipes from brewing practice, where their preservative effect on beer was long understood, and hop yeast was common enough that "hop-rising" bread is a recognised regional term. Compressed fresh yeast reached the American market in the 1860s and 1870s and spread fast, which is exactly the transition this page records: the old brewing method is printed, but both versions now start from a bought cake, and the bread recipe that follows dispenses with the homemade yeast altogether. Entries like these would gradually become less common in general cookbooks, though home yeast recipes persisted in print for decades.