Farmers' Yeast
A yeast which is especially good for the use of farmers, and others who use a great deal of bread and bake frequently, is made as follows: Take a handful of unpressed or two ounces of pressed hops (those showing the pollen dust are best), put them in one quart of water, with four ordinary potatoes, and boil till the potatoes are well cooked; mash all together, and strain through a linen strainer, add flour enough to make a thick batter; a tea-spoon salt, a tablespoon pulverized ginger and half a cup sugar; set it back on the fire and let it come to a boil, stirring constantly, and set by to cool; when only milk warm add a cup of old yeast, or two cakes grocers' dry hop yeast, or half a cup bakers'. This will be light in two or three hours. The yeast may be made perpetual, by saving a cup when started, but it must be kept from freezing in winter and in a cool place in summer. This is a good mode, and acceptable to all who prefer yeast bread. - Mrs. H. Young,
This is a liquid bread starter, not a dough: a hopped potato-and-flour batter seeded with existing yeast and kept alive by saving a cupful each time. It works as written, but almost every ingredient it names has changed form since 1883.
- Hops"Unpressed" hops means loose dried cones, "pressed" the compacted product sold by weight; two ounces of whole cone hops is a large volume, several quarts loosely packed. Pellets can substitute by weight, using somewhat less. Low-alpha aroma varieties (Hallertau, Fuggle) are probably closer to nineteenth-century hops than high-alpha American cultivars. The hops act as preservative as much as flavouring "the lactic bacteria that turn a starter sour and ropy are inhibited by hop acids.
- Potatoes"Four ordinary potatoes" probably means medium ones, perhaps 1 to 1 1/2 lb total. Use a starchy variety; the point is gelatinized starch for the yeast to feed on.
- "Milk warm"The hinge of the whole thing. Milk warm is blood heat, 95 to 100F — barely warm on the wrist. Adding the seed yeast to the batter while it is still hot enough to feel hot will kill it, and the batch will simply sour instead of rising.
- Seed yeast"Grocers' dry hop yeast" cakes are gone, and what a baker would once have supplied by the half-cup is no longer purchasable. One packet (2 1/4 tsp) of active dry yeast will start this quantity; so will a cup of any lively liquid starter. The "cup of old yeast" is the traditional backslop, and it is what makes the yeast "perpetual."
- Flour enoughAim for a batter about the consistency of thick pancake batter, adding flour gradually to the strained quart. Stir constantly during the second boil; a flour batter scorches on the bottom quickly.
- Ginger and sugarThe sugar feeds the yeast and speeds the first rise. Ginger appears in many nineteenth-century yeast recipes and was said to hasten fermentation; its contribution here is mainly flavour, and it can be reduced or left out without breaking the method.
- Keeping it"A cool place in summer" means the refrigerator now. Held cold, the saved cup will keep a week or two; feed it with a fresh batch before it separates badly or smells of acetone. Discard and start again if it turns pink, orange, or stringy — that is bacterial, not yeast.
- Yield and useAbout a quart of liquid yeast. Old bread recipes calling for "a cup of yeast" mean this sort of thing; reckon roughly one cup per two loaves, and expect a longer, slower rise than packaged yeast gives.
Before compressed yeast became reliably available in American groceries in the 1870s and 80s, households commonly kept a living liquid starter, and hops were the standard insurance against it spoiling — the same antibacterial property that makes hopped beer keep longer than unhopped ale. The potato supplied starch and a hospitable medium, and versions of this formula appear under names like hop yeast, potato yeast, and everlasting yeast across nineteenth-century American cookbooks. The Dixie Cook Book prints it as "farmers'" yeast. The signed attribution to Mrs. H. Young is typical of the book's method: much of it was assembled from contributed household recipes rather than written by a single author.