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Bread Raised Twice
Measure out four quarts of sifted flour, take out a pint in a cup, and place remainder in a bread-pan. Make a well in the middle, into which turn one table-spoon sugar, one of salt, and one cup of yeast; then mix in one pint of milk which has been made bloodwarm by adding one pint of boiling water; beat well with a strong spoon, add one table-spoon lard, knead for twenty to thirty minutes, and let rise over night; in the morning knead again, make into loaves, let them rise one hour, and bake fifty minutes. Water may be used instead of the pint of milk, in which case use twice as much lard.
A straight overnight dough from the era before packaged yeast, written for a cook who knew her own barm and her own stove. The quantities scale to three good-sized loaves; the two things the original leaves out are the yeast strength and the oven temperature.
- Four quarts of flourMeasured by volume after sifting, four quarts is 16 cups, or roughly 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 lb of modern all-purpose flour depending on how lightly it is handled. The recipe does not say what the reserved pint is for; most likely it was kept back for kneading and dusting the board rather than as an extra addition.
- "One cup of yeast"This means a cup of liquid yeast or barm kept going in the kitchen, not anything sold today. For a dough this size, about 2 teaspoons of instant yeast is the working equivalent, and you must then add back roughly a cup of liquid to compensate for the volume the barm supplied.
- BloodwarmBlood heat is about 98F. Equal volumes of cold milk and boiling water actually average well above that, nearer 120 to 125F before losses to the pan, so the mixture wants a few minutes to cool before it meets the yeast. With modern yeast anything from 90 to 105F is fine; above about 120F you start killing it.
- The overnight rise is the hingeThis dough was left in a kitchen that would have gone cold overnight. In a warm modern house with commercial yeast it may well overproof and taste sour; if so, cut the yeast back or put the covered bowl in the refrigerator after the first hour.
- Kneading timeTwenty to thirty minutes by hand was standard advice in manuals of this kind, and assumes hand work rather than a machine. With bread flour and a stand mixer, 8 to 10 minutes on medium gets you the same gluten development; by hand, 12 to 15.
- Oven temperatureNone is given because the cook judged her own range. Fifty minutes suits large loaves at 375F, with the crust checked at 40 minutes; the loaves are done at an internal 195 to 200F.
- Lard and the water variationOne tablespoon of lard in this much flour is a very lean dough, close to a plain water bread. Butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly; the instruction to double the fat when using water alone compensates for the fat lost with the milk.
- YieldExpect three loaves in 9x5 in pans, or four smaller ones. The second kneading in the morning is a full degassing, not a quick fold.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of compiled American household manuals that circulated in the 1880s and after, assembled from contributed and reprinted receipts rather than written by a single hand. "Bread raised twice" is a description of method, not a dish name: the dough rises once overnight and again in the pans, as distinct from sponge-set breads, where a thin batter of flour, water and yeast is fermented first and the rest of the flour worked in later. The cup of yeast suggests a kitchen without packaged yeast: compressed yeast was commercially sold from the 1870s, but home ferments remained common, and a cook might keep a jar of barm or a potato-and-hop ferment alive on the shelf, feed it, and measure it by the cupful ransthe anything to us today. The overnight schedule was practical rather than artisanal, letting the dough work through the cool night so loaves could go into a stove already lit for the morning's cooking.