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Bread Sponge and Bread
Five pints warm water, five quarts sifted flour, one coffee-cup yeast; mix in a two-gallon stone jar, cover closely, and set in a large tin pan, so that if the sponge rises over the top of the jar, the drippings may fall into the pan. Set to rise the evening before baking. In winter be careful to set in a warm place. In the morning sift six quarts flour into a pail, pour the sponge into a breadpan or bowl, add two table-spoons of salt, then the flour gradually; mix and knead well, using up nearly all the flour. This first kueading is the most important, and should occupy at least twenty minutes. Make the bread in one large loaf, set away in a warm place, and cover with a cloth. It ought to rise in half an hour, when it should be kneaded thoroughly again for ten minutes. Then take enough dough for three good-sized loaves (a quart bowl of dough to each), give five minutes kneading to each loaf, and place to rise in a dripping-pan well greased with lard. The loaves will be light in five or ten minutes, and will bake in a properly heated oven in half an hour. Make a well in the center of the remaining dough, and into it put a half tea-cup of white sugar, one tea-cup of lard, and two eggs, which mix thoroughly with the dough, knead into one large loaf, set in a warm place about fifteen minutes to rise, and, when light, knead five minutes and let rise again for about ten minutes, when it should be light. Take out of pan, and knead on bread-board, roll about an inch in thickness, cut out with a biscuit cutter, and place in dripping-pan; let rise five minutes and bake twenty minutes. In winter more time must be allowed for rising. This makes three loaves and ninety biscuit.
This is a full baking-day formula scaled to a large household: roughly eleven quarts of flour worked in two stages. Read the rising times as the author's optimism about a lively homemade barm, not as instructions to follow by the clock.
- Scale it down firstEleven quarts of flour is on the order of 11-12 lb, yielding three large loaves plus ninety biscuits. A quarter of the recipe (about 1 1/4 pints water and 1 1/4 quarts flour for the sponge) fits a domestic bowl and oven.
- The yeast is the unknownA "coffee-cup" of yeast means about a cup of liquid barm or a home-brewed hop yeast, whose strength is unknowable now. There is no honest conversion; for a sponge of this size about 2 teaspoons of instant yeast slaked in the warm water is one reasonable modern substitution, and it will behave differently.
- Rising times are wrong for modern yeastLoaves are said to be light in five or ten minutes. Nothing made with commercial yeast proofs that fast. Judge by the dough: the shaped loaves need 45-90 minutes, and "more time in winter" is the only part of the timing advice that still holds.
- The hinge is the first kneadingTwenty full minutes on the first knead is not padding. This dough is built from a very wet sponge with a great deal of flour added late, and the gluten has to be built by hand. In a stand mixer with a dough hook, 10-12 minutes on medium-low does the same work.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature, only a "properly heated oven." For bread of this kind a modern reading of around 400-425F is reasonable, and the loaves may need longer than the stated half hour.
- VesselsThe two-gallon stone jar is simply a large crock, and the tin pan beneath it catches overflow. A "dripping-pan" is a shallow roasting pan, used here as a baking sheet for the biscuits and as a loaf pan for the enriched dough.
- LardLard greases the pans and enriches the second dough. Butter or a neutral shortening works in its place.
- SaltTwo tablespoons for eleven quarts of flour is on the light side by current taste. Scaled down, allow about 2 percent of the flour weight.
The sponge-and-dough method here — a loose overnight batter of water, flour and yeast, then a second, much larger addition of flour in the morning — was widely recommended in American household print through the nineteenth century, because it let a weak, home-propagated yeast multiply overnight before it had to lift a heavy dough. The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the large family of compiled community cookbooks that grew out of the Ohio Buckeye Cookery tradition, and its bread chapter is written for a house where baking happened once or twice a week for a big table. The economy of the method is visible in the last paragraph: rather than mix a second dough, the cook opens a well in the leftover and works in sugar, lard and eggs, turning plain bread into ninety sweet biscuits from the same bowl and the same heated oven.