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Baking Powder, Barm and Yeast (Note From the many recipes)
Note. - From the many recipes for yeast, baking powder, and barm collected by Lady Clark, the following are selected for the use of those living far from where brewer's yeast or German compressed yeast are obtainable. The latter, however, and dry American yeast cakes in tins can now be had by post. The best and simplest home-made baking powder is: 1 tablespoonful each of bicarbonate of soda, of cream of tartar and of cornflour. - C.F.F.
Baking Powder. No. 1. (Lady Wensleydale. From Dr. Alfred Taylor.) Ingredients: 5 ozs. pure bicarbonate of soda finely powdered, 4 ozs. pure tartaric acid also finely powdered, 1½ ozs. ground rice.
These 3 things to be thoroughly mixed together with an ivory or a wooden knife (on no account with metal), and then to be kept in a wide-mouthed glass bottle with glass stopper (not a cork) in a cool, dry place.
It is better only to mix enough for a week, or the ingredients neutralize one another. 3/4 oz. is the quantity used to each lb. of flour, for baking. Baking Powder. No. 2. (Sir Henry Thompson, 1880.) 2 ozs. tartaric acid, 3 ozs. bicarbonate of soda, and 3 ozs. arrowroot. Should be well mixed together by the chemist.
Keep in a wide-mouthed bottle with glass stopper.
Barm - Australian. (Mrs. Penrose Rogers, Falmouth. 1881.) In 2 qts. of cold water put ½ oz. of hops tied up in a muslin bag, with 6 good-sized peeled potatoes. Boil all together until quite soft, then mash through a colander, pouring them and the liquor on ½ teacupful of moist sugar, and a small teaspoonful of salt. When tolerably hot, add a teacupful old barm - of the same sort if possible,
Three formulas in one entry: two home baking powders, a compiler's simplified version, and the beginning of a hop-and-potato barm. The powders are worth understanding chemically before you mix any of them; the barm, as printed here, stops mid-sentence.
- The text breaks offThe Australian barm ends at "add a teacupful old barm - of the same sort if possible," with the fermenting, bottling and keeping instructions missing. It also requires an existing barm to seed it, so it is a maintenance recipe rather than a way to start from nothing. Treat it as a historical fragment, not a working method.
- Tartaric acid is not cream of tartarRecipes No. 1 and No. 2 call for tartaric acid, which is more than twice as strong an acid by weight as cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) and reacts with the soda almost the instant liquid is added. Batters raised with it must go into the oven immediately; there is no second lift in the heat as with modern double-acting powder.
- The compiler's simple formula is soda-heavyEqual tablespoons of bicarbonate, cream of tartar and cornflour leaves a large excess of unreacted soda, which tastes soapy and yellows the crumb. The neutral proportion is about two parts cream of tartar to one part soda by volume, with the starch as a drying agent on top of that.
- The ground rice and arrowrootNeither is a leavening ingredient. They are moisture buffers, keeping the acid and alkali apart in the jar; modern commercial powders use cornstarch for exactly the same reason. The warning in No. 1 that the ingredients "neutralize one another" over time is the whole point of the filler, and of mixing only a week's worth.
- No metalThe instruction to blend with ivory or wood, and to store under a glass stopper rather than cork, is most likely about keeping damp and reactive surfaces away from a dry acid-alkali mixture. A plastic or wooden spoon and a screw-top glass jar do the job now.
- Quantities and yieldNo. 1 makes about 10½ oz of powder; at ¾ oz per lb of flour that is enough for roughly fourteen pounds of flour, far more than the week the note recommends keeping it. Scaling the whole formula down to a fifth is more realistic. For reference, ¾ oz per lb of flour works out at roughly four to five level teaspoons per pound, at the upper end of modern practice.
- Barm measuresA teacupful in this period is about a quarter of a pint, roughly 5 fl oz. Half an ounce of hops in two quarts of water is a bittering rate closer to beer than to bread, and the hops are there as much to inhibit spoilage bacteria as for flavour.
- The yeasts namedGerman compressed yeast is fresh cake yeast; brewer's yeast is the barm skimmed from a working ale. Dry American yeast cakes were the shelf-stable alternative that made these home barms unnecessary. Modern instant dried yeast replaces all three, at about a third the weight of fresh.
Home-mixed baking powder appears in Victorian household books for two reasons: commercial powders were the subject of persistent complaints about adulteration, and rural households could not always get fresh brewer's or compressed yeast. Both named sources here are medical men, which is telling. Sir Henry Thompson was a surgeon whose Food and Feeding appeared in 1880, the year attached to his formula, and who wrote at length on digestion and diet; Dr Alfred Taylor is very likely Alfred Swaine Taylor, the forensic toxicologist whose name carried authority on the purity of chemicals sold to the public. Lady Clark, collecting from friends across the 1870s and 1880s, gathered such recipes because a country house in Aberdeenshire could not send out for a tin of Borwick's. By the time the book was edited for publication in 1909, the note admits as much: compressed yeast and dry yeast cakes could now be had by post, and the barms had become a curiosity.