Home › Bread-Making › Another Salt-Rising Bread
Another Salt-Rising Bread
In summer take at night one (scant) pint of new milk, half as much hot water, a tea-spoon salt, one of sugar, and a very little soda. Mix all in a nice, sweet pitcher (it must be perfectly clean and sweet), stir in one table-spoon of corn meal, and add flour enough to make a medium batter; stir well, place the pitcher in an iron kettle with quite warm water, using so much water that the pitcher will barely rest on the bottom of the kettle; cover closely and leave all night (on the stove if the fire is nearly out) where it will be kept warm, not hot, for an hour or two. If the pitcher is not too large, it will probably be full in the morning; if not, add a spoon of flour, stir well, warm the water in the kettle, replace the pitcher, cover, and keep it warm until light. Have ready two quarts of sifted flour in a pan, make a hole in the center, put in an even tea-spoon of salt, a tea-cup of nearly boiling water; add one pint of new milk, and stir a batter there in the center of the flour, add the "emptyings" from the pitcher, and stir well (there will be a good deal of flour all round the batter; this is right); cover with another pan, keep warm until light-it will rise in an hour or even less-when it is ready to be well kneaded, and made directly into loaves, which place in the baking-pans, keep well covered and warm until light, when it is ready to bake. The secret of success is to keep it warm but not at all hot. This bread is good if no milk is used; indeed, some prefer it made with water alone instead of milk and water. In cold weather, if kitchen is cold at night, do not set "emptyings" over night, but make early in the morning. - Havillah, Farina,
Salt-rising bread is a wild bacterial ferment rather than a yeast bread, and it fails for the same reason every time: the starter got too hot or too cold. The instruction to keep it "warm but not at all hot" is the whole recipe.
- Hold the starter at 100-110FThe bacteria that raise this bread work in a narrow band, roughly 100-115F, and die or stall outside it. The iron kettle of warm water on a dying stove is a crude proofing box; a yogurt maker, a sous vide bath with the pitcher standing in it, or an oven with only the light on does the job with far less guesswork.
- "New milk" and the sodaNew milk is fresh milk straight from the cow. Use pasteurized whole milk; do not use raw milk for a starter held warm for eight hours. "A very little soda" is not quantified in the original; an eighth of a teaspoon is a reasonable modern reading, and it is presumably there to blunt the acidity that would otherwise check the ferment.
- The corn meal mattersUse stone-ground meal, preferably white and not degerminated. The bacteria come in on the grain, and highly refined, heat-treated supermarket meal often carries nothing that will start.
- The smell is the testA working starter foams, thins, and smells strongly of cheese, feet or stale beer. That aroma is correct and is what the finished loaf will taste of. A starter that merely smells sour, or does nothing in twelve hours, has failed and should be discarded rather than coaxed.
- QuantitiesA scant pint of milk is just under 2 cups; two quarts of sifted flour is about 8 cups, or a shade under 2 lb. The "tea-cup of nearly boiling water" is about 6 fl oz on the usual reading of a nineteenth-century teacup; it goes in before the pint of milk, which suggests it is meant to scald part of the flour, though the recipe neither says so nor calls the milk cold.
- "Emptyings"An old word for leaven or barm, originally the dregs emptied from a beer cask. Here it simply means the risen contents of the pitcher.
- Rising timesThe overnight starter usually needs 6-12 hours. The sponge and the shaped loaves rise faster than yeast bread -- the recipe allows an hour or less -- and must stay warm throughout; a cold draught at any stage can stall the dough badly, and it may not recover.
- BakingNo oven temperature is given, as the book assumes a wood range; 375F for 35-45 minutes, until the internal temperature reads at least 200F, is a reasonable modern equivalent. The recipe does not say how many loaves it makes; two quarts of flour will give two or three.
- On the microbiologyThe organism generally credited with raising salt-rising bread is Clostridium perfringens, itself a species associated with food poisoning, and some food-safety writers have questioned the tradition on that account. The bread is fully baked; the starter itself should never be tasted raw.
Salt-rising bread is an Appalachian and Ohio Valley speciality, generally traced to settlers who had no reliable supply of brewer's barm or dried yeast cakes and raised their bread instead on whatever wild bacteria came in on the corn meal. The name has never been satisfactorily explained: it is often said to come from the practice of nesting the starter jug in a box of heated salt to hold the temperature overnight, though the salt in the dough itself is the simpler explanation. The surviving receipts vary a good deal from one another, which is a fair measure of how temperamental the method was and how strongly each cook believed in her own arrangement of pitcher, kettle and stove. The line about not setting the emptyings overnight in a cold kitchen is the practical heart of it: before thermostats, the baker worked around the fire's decline rather than against it.