Hop Yeast
.
Place a handful of hops in two quarts of cold water, boil slowly for a half hour, strain boiling hot on one pint flour and one tablespoon salt (gradually at first in order to mix smoothly); when lukewarm add a half pint of yeast, and set in a warm place to rise. When light, cover and keep in a cool place. - Mrs. M. J. Woods.
This is a liquid barm for bread baking, not a drink: a hop tea thickened with scalded flour, then seeded with a cup of an earlier batch. It only works if you already have live yeast, which is how most nineteenth-century kitchens ran.
- The hingeThe boiling hop water must be poured onto the flour a little at a time and stirred smooth, exactly as written, or you get lumps of raw flour suspended in liquid. The heat also gelatinises the starch, which is what gives the barm its body and food for the yeast.
- Temperatures that matterWait until the mixture is genuinely lukewarm, around 100F or below, before adding the yeast; scalding-hot flour paste will kill it. "A warm place" means no more than a comfortably warm spot in the kitchen, and "a cool place" would be the cellar or pantry then, the refrigerator today.
- A handful of hopsReckon on about half an ounce of dried hop flowers. Any variety works; the hops are here for bitterness and their mild antibacterial effect, which slows the souring of the barm, rather than for flavour in the finished loaf.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume, so a pint is about two cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz of plain flour. The result should be a thin batter, not a dough.
- Half a pint of yeastThis means a cup of liquid yeast from a previous batch of the same thing. Substituting one packet of active dry yeast, softened in a little of the lukewarm liquid, will start it, though the flavour of a long-established barm is different.
- TimingExpect 6 to 12 hours to become foamy and "light" at room temperature. It is ready when the surface is covered in bubbles and it smells sharply of beer; once it smells of vinegar or nail polish it has gone too far.
- Yield and useYou get roughly two quarts, depending on how much boils away in the half hour. The original assumes you know the dose: about half a cup per two-loaf batch of bread is a reasonable starting point, replacing roughly that much of the recipe's liquid. Refrigerated, it keeps a week or two, and it should be stirred and smelled before each use.
Before packaged yeast became reliable and cheap, a household kept its own leaven going, and hop yeast was one common American version of it: hop tea, scalded flour or potato, and a cup held back from the last batch to seed the next. The hops came from brewing practice, where their preservative power against souring bacteria had long been understood, and a bitter barm resisted spoilage better than a plain flour one in a warm kitchen. Recipes of this kind fill the yeast chapters of community compilations like The Dixie Cook Book (1883), usually credited to the individual women who contributed them. Fleischmann's compressed yeast, shown at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, is generally credited with beginning the shift that made pages like this one obsolete within a generation or two.