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Potato Yeast Without Hops
Four good-sized potatoes peeled, boiled and mashed, four tablespoons white sugar, one of ginger, one of salt, two cups flour; pour over this a pint of boiling water, and beat till all the lumps disappear. After it has cooled, add to it one cup good yeast, and set away to rise; when risen put in glass or stone jar, cover and set away in a cool place. - Mrs. George H. Rust,
This is a bread starter rather than something to eat on its own: a sweetened potato-and-flour mash inoculated with an existing yeast culture and kept as a liquid ferment for baking. It presumes you already have "good yeast" on hand, which is the part most modern kitchens lack.
- The hinge: temperature when you add the yeast"After it has cooled" means lukewarm, around 100F or below. Boiling water has just gone over the flour and potato, and adding the cup of yeast too soon will kill it.
- "One cup good yeast"This means a cup of an active liquid yeast from a previous batch, the way a sourdough baker keeps a starter. It is not a substitute for a packet of dry yeast, which is roughly 2¼ teaspoons and would not be measured in cups.
- "Without hops"Many yeast recipes of the period began with a hop tea, which flavored the ferment and, hops being mildly antibacterial, helped hold competing bacteria in check. Leaving hops out likely gives a milder starter that sours sooner.
- Ginger's purposeGinger appears in a number of period yeast recipes and was thought to encourage the ferment; it can be left out.
- The sugar loadFour tablespoons of sugar against a pint of boiling water is a generous feed, meant to get a vigorous rise. In a warm room expect foaming within a few hours.
- VesselsGlass or stone (stoneware) was the usual specification for a ferment, metal being reactive; the recipe itself gives no reason. Use glass or food-grade ceramic, cover loosely rather than sealing — a sealed jar of active ferment builds pressure.
- "A cool place"In 1880s practice this was a cellar or springhouse, roughly 50–60F. The refrigerator is the modern equivalent; use within about a week, and expect it to separate and smell sharply alcoholic.
- Yield and useWith a pint of water, a cup of yeast, four potatoes and two cups of flour, this makes well over a quart. Period bread recipes often call for something like half a cup to a cup of such yeast per loaf, with a long overnight rise rather than the hour or two commercial yeast needs.
Before packaged yeast was reliable and cheap, keeping a live ferment going was a routine domestic chore, and cookbooks of the 1880s devote whole sections to it, as The Dixie Cook-Book does here. Potatoes were a common base because their starch is already gelatinized by boiling and feeds yeast readily, giving a faster and more predictable ferment than flour alone. The usual method involved a decoction of hops, valued at least for its bitterness, so a recipe advertising itself as "without hops" is answering a real household problem: hops were a purchased item, and not every kitchen had them. Compressed fresh yeast in cakes was becoming commercially available in American cities through the 1870s and 1880s, and within a generation recipes like this one had largely disappeared from general cookbooks — surviving mainly in the sourdough and salt-rising traditions.