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Good Bread
For four small loaves boil four large potatoes; when done, pour off the water, and when it cools add to it a yeast cake; mash the potato very fine, put through a sieve, pour boiling milk on as much flour as is needed, let stand until cool, add the potato and yeast, a large tea-spoon of salt and one table-spoon of sugar; stir very stiff, adding flour as is needed. Let stand in a warm place until light, dissolve one tea-spoon of soda in a little hot water, mix well through with the hands, mold into loaves, and let rise again. When sufficiently raised place in a moderately hot oven, keeping up a steady fire.-Mrs. Governor Hardin, Missouri.
A potato-water sponge bread from the era of compressed yeast cakes. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows what stiff dough feels like, so the flour is never measured and the times are never given.
- The hinge: temperature of the potato waterThe instruction to let the water cool before adding the yeast cake is the one step that cannot be fudged. Hot water will damage or kill the yeast; aim for lukewarm, comfortably below hand-hot.
- Yeast cakeIf the "cake" is compressed yeast, it corresponds to about 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast, i.e. one modern envelope; a nineteenth-century yeast cake may instead have been a dried homemade cake of unstandardised strength, so treat this as an approximation. Dry yeast can go straight into the cooled potato water.
- Flour, unmeasuredFor four small loaves expect roughly 6 to 7 cups of bread or all-purpose flour in total, split between the scalded portion and what is worked in afterward. Judge by feel: a dough stiff enough to hold a shape but still slightly tacky.
- Scalded flourPouring boiling milk over flour gelatinizes the starch and gives a softer, moister crumb that keeps longer. It must cool to lukewarm before it meets the yeast, which is why the recipe says to let it stand.
- The sodaA teaspoon of soda kneaded in after the first rise neutralizes acidity from a long or warm fermentation, a real concern with potato-yeast doughs left overnight. With modern yeast and a rise of an hour or two the dough will not be sour, and the soda can be left out; if used, work it in thoroughly or it will leave bitter yellow streaks.
- Rising times"Until light" is about 1 to 1 1/2 hours at 75-80F for the first rise, and 45 minutes to an hour for the shaped loaves, until they hold a slight dent when pressed.
- Oven"Moderately hot" in a wood-stove kitchen corresponds roughly to 375-400F in a modern oven, though the book gives no temperatures. "Keeping up a steady fire" is the wood-stove cook's way of saying do not let the heat fall off partway through; a preheated oven handles it. Small loaves take 30-40 minutes, and are done at 200-205F internal.
- Yield and pansFour small loaves means roughly 8x4-inch pans. The dough also bakes well free-form on a sheet, though it spreads more than a stiff lean dough.
Potato bread of this kind was common in American households through the nineteenth century, well before commercial dry yeast: boiled potato and its starchy water were said to feed the yeast vigorously and to give a dependable rise in an unheated kitchen, and the loaf was reputed to stay soft for days, which mattered when baking happened once or twice a week. The soda is a relic of the same problem, an insurance policy against a sponge that had soured overnight. The attribution to "Mrs. Governor Hardin, Missouri" likely reflects how The Dixie Cook Book was assembled, as many subscription and community cookbooks of the 1880s appear to have been, from contributions solicited from prominent women whose names lent the book authority; Charles Henry Hardin served as governor of Missouri in the mid-1870s. The result is a recipe written cook-to-cook, with the judgment left where its author assumed it belonged, in the reader's hands.