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Bread Raised Three Times
This Begin about 5 P. M., plan for six loaves, somewhat larger than bakers' loaves; take two little cakes of yeast, put them into a pint of tepid water, and, when soft, beat in thoroughly enough flour to make a thick batter, and put in a warm place. If the excellent "Farmer's Yeast," the recipe for which is given hereafter, is used, take half a tea-cup and stir into the batter. A good dish for this purpose is a large bowl, a broad open pitcher, or a bright threequart tin pail, and it should be clean in the strictest sense. should rise in about two hours; and when nearly light, take six or eight medium-sized potatoes, pare neatly, rinse clean, and boil in three pints of water till well done, mash very fine in the water while hot. Have ready a bread-pan of sifted flour, into which put a tea-spoon of salt, half a cup of white sugar, and a bit of lard as large as an egg; then riddle the potato mash, hot as it is, through a sieve or fine colander into the flour, and stir with a kitchen spoon into a stiff dough. This scalds about half the flour used in the batch of bread. This mass must cool till it will not scald the yeast, which may now be mixed in and put in a warm, not hot, place for second rising, which will be accomplished by morning, when the kneading may be done. Kneading is the finest point of bread-making, and contains more of the art than any other; it requires skill, time, patience, and hard work. Work in flour no faster than is required to allow thorough kneading, which can not be done in less than forty-five minutes, but should not be worked much over an hour; one hour is a good uniform rule. The mechanical bakers use sets of rollers driven by steam power, between which the dough is passed, coming out a sheet an inch thick; it is folded together several times and rolled again and again. This process should be imitated somewhat by the hands in the family kitchen. The working of the dough gives grain and flakiness to the bread. The dough when kneaded should be soft, but not sticky-stiff enough to retain its roundness on the board. Put back into the pan for the third rising, which will require but little time, and when light, cut off enough for each loaf by itself. Knead but little, and put into the baking-pans. If the first kneading has been well done, no more flour will be needed in molding into loaves. These must remain in the baking-pans till nearly as large as the loaves ought to be, when they may be put into a well-heated oven. If the oven is a trifle too hot, or if it tends to bake hard on the top, a piece of brown paper may be put over the loaves (save some clean grocer's paper for this purpose), and from forty to sixty minutes will cook it thoroughly. After the loaves are put into the baking-pans, avoid jarring them, as it will make portions of them heavy. If the yeast is "set" at 5 P. M., the bread will be ready for dinner next day; if in the morning, the baking will be done early in the evening, or twelve hours after, with fair temperature and good yeast. Bread made in this way will be good for a week, and, with fair weather and careful keeping, even two weeks. When dry, a slice toasted will be as crisp, sweet, and granular as Yankee ginger-bread. - Mrs. H. Young,
A full overnight potato-sponge bread, written for a cook who baked six loaves at a time and knew her flour by feel. The quantities of flour are never stated, which is the main thing to plan around.
- The hinge: riddle the potato mash hotPressing the hot mashed potato and its cooking water through a sieve into the flour scalds roughly half the flour, which is what gives this bread its moist crumb and long keeping. It must then cool to no more than lukewarm before the yeast batter goes in, or the yeast will be scalded.
- Yeast quantities"Two little cakes" means the small cakes of yeast sold in the period, which are not equivalent to the modern 0.6 oz cake. For six loaves with these long, slow rises, two packets (about 4 1/2 tsp) of active dry yeast is ample; less will still work given the timetable. "Farmer's Yeast" is a homemade yeast whose recipe the book gives elsewhere.
- Flour and yieldNo flour weight is given anywhere; flour is added in stages, by feel, until the dough holds its round shape on the board. Bread flour suits this better than modern all-purpose.
- Salt is far too lowOne teaspoon of salt across six loaves is barely detectable. Modern practice is about 2 percent of the flour weight, which for a batch this size means several times what is called for here.
- "A bit of lard as large as an egg"About 2 oz, or a scant 1/4 cup. Butter or shortening substitutes directly.
- Forty-five minutes of kneadingModern bread flour will not need anything like this; 10 to 15 minutes by hand, or 8 in a stand mixer, will generally develop the gluten sufficiently, and the overnight sponge has already done much of the work. The advice not to jar the shaped loaves still holds.
- OvenA "well-heated oven" is best read as a hot one, in the region of 400F. Large loaves take the full 40 to 60 minutes the recipe allows; bake to an internal temperature of 200 to 205F. The brown grocer's paper laid over the tops to stop over-browning can be replaced with loosely tented foil.
- The timetableSponge at 5 P.M., potato dough an hour or two later, second rise overnight, knead and shape in the morning, bake by midday. A cool kitchen stretches the overnight stage; the refrigerator was not part of the plan and will slow it considerably.
Potato bread of this kind appears in American cookbooks of the nineteenth century, and the reason is chemical rather than sentimental: potato starch holds water, feeds yeast readily, and keeps a loaf soft for days in a house with no refrigeration, which is exactly the claim made at the end of the recipe. The three-rise sponge method also hedged against unreliable leaven. The recipe offers bought cakes of yeast as the first option, and the note pointing readers to "Farmer's Yeast" elsewhere in the book shows that a homemade alternative was still close at hand. The Dixie Cook Book, like other compilations of the 1880s, gathered its contents from named contributors, and the tone of this entry is characteristic of them: it argues a position, in this case that kneading is the whole art of bread, and even reaches for the steam-driven roller mills of commercial bakeries as the standard a hand baker should try to imitate.