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Salt-Rising Bread
Scald in one-half pint of sweet milk three tablespoons of corn meal. Let stand over night. In the morning add to this one quart of warm water, one teaspoon salt, and sufficient flour to make a thick batter. Set this where it will keep warm. After this has raised, knead into it enough flour to make a stiff dough. Then work into loaves and set in a warm place to rise. When light, bake.
This is a wild-fermented bread with no yeast in it at all — the rise comes from bacteria that arrive with the cornmeal and multiply in a warm, sweet milk mush. Everything depends on holding that starter hot, well above ordinary bread-proofing temperature.
- The hinge: heat, not warmthThe cornmeal starter needs to be held at roughly 100–115°F for its overnight stand and again after the water and flour go in. At normal room temperature it will simply sour or do nothing. A turned-off oven with the light on, a cooler holding a jar of hot water, or a proofing box set to 105°F all work; a cold kitchen is the usual reason salt-rising bread fails.
- "Sweet milk"Plain fresh whole milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or sour milk that appear elsewhere in books of this period. Scalding means heating to just below a boil, around 180°F, then pouring it over the cornmeal.
- CornmealUse stone-ground, unbleached, non-degerminated meal if you can find it. Bakers of this bread generally report that heavily processed degerminated supermarket meal gives a slower or less reliable start, which is usually put down to its having less of the surface flora the method depends on.
- UnitsHalf a pint of milk is one cup; a quart of warm water is four cups. The recipe does not say how warm; since the whole mass has to stay in the 100-115F band, aim at the upper end of 'warm' rather than merely blood heat.
- Flour quantitiesThe original gives none, and cannot -- it depends on your flour. With five cups of liquid (one cup milk, four cups water) expect somewhere in the region of 12 to 15 cups of bread or all-purpose flour in total to reach a stiff dough. Add it in stages and stop while the dough is still slightly tacky.
- The smellA working starter smells sharply of cheese, or something close to old socks. That is correct and expected, and it mellows a good deal in the oven, though the baked loaf keeps a distinctive tang. A starter that smells only of wet flour has not started; one that smells putrid or has gone slimy should be discarded and begun again.
- TimingsThe morning batter usually takes 2 to 4 hours at 105°F to become foamy and domed. The shaped loaves rise more slowly than yeast bread — allow 2 to 4 hours in a warm spot. The dough is not vigorous, so do not expect a dramatic spring.
- "When light, bake"Bake at 375°F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the crust is deep brown and the internal temperature reaches about 200°F. The loaves will sound hollow but feel dense; the crumb is meant to be close and fine, not open.
- YieldFour or so standard 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch loaves from this quantity of liquid. The bread stales quickly, and it is often recommended toasted.
Salt-rising bread belongs to the Appalachian and Ohio Valley kitchens of the nineteenth century, where it is generally traced to households that had no reliable access to brewer's yeast or the leftover barm from beer-making. In place of yeast it uses bacteria -- most often identified as species of Clostridium -- that thrive in a hot cornmeal-and-milk mush and produce enough gas to raise a dough, which is why the starter must be kept far hotter than an ordinary yeast dough would be proofed. The name is usually explained as a reference to the bed of hot salt cooks used to insulate the crock overnight, though the point is disputed and the salt does no leavening work. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, commercial compressed yeast was cheap and widely available, and salt-rising bread was already a regional survival kept up for its taste rather than out of necessity -- a distinctly tangy, close-grained loaf that people either sought out or refused entirely.