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Rye Bread (Make sponge as for wheat bread)
Make sponge as for wheat bread, let rise over night, then mix it up with the rye flour (not so stiff as wheat bread), and bake. t
This is a note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you have already read the wheat bread entry and know how a sponge behaves. The points below fill in what the original leaves to the cook's judgment.
- What "sponge" means hereA slack batter of water, yeast and flour, left to ferment overnight before the rest of the flour goes in. The original gives no quantities; as a working reconstruction, roughly half the total flour, enough liquid to make it pourable, and a small amount of yeast — a teaspoon of instant yeast per two loaves is ample for a 10–12 hour rise at room temperature. Older recipes often called for much more yeast, probably because home and commercial yeasts of the period varied in strength.
- "Not so stiff as wheat bread"This is the hinge of the recipe. Rye has little gluten and its pentosans absorb a great deal of water, so a rye dough that feels correctly firm while mixing will bake dense and dry. Aim for a dough that is noticeably tacky and slumps slightly when you stop working it.
- Do not knead it like wheatThe rye portion contributes little usable gluten, and since the wheat sponge supplies what structure there is, prolonged kneading gains little. Mix until uniform — three or four minutes — and stop; extended working tends to leave the crumb gummy.
- Rye flour then and nowRye of this period was probably less refined than modern light rye, closer in character to today's medium rye. Medium rye is the reasonable substitute; the wheat-flour sponge keeps the loaf from being a brick.
- Second riseThe original omits it, but the shaped loaves need 45–60 minutes, no more. Rye overproofs quickly and collapses; bake when the dough has grown by about half rather than doubled.
- Oven temperatureThe entry gives none. A modern working schedule: start at 425F for 15 minutes, then drop to 375F for another 30–40 minutes. An internal temperature of 200–205F is the reliable test.
- Cool completely before cuttingRye crumb sets as it cools and continues firming for hours after it leaves the oven. Cutting a warm loaf gives a sticky, pasty slice; wait at least four hours, ideally overnight.
- YieldBuilt on about 6 cups of flour in total, the reconstruction above makes two standard loaves; the original states no amounts. The stray "t" at the end of the entry appears to be a stray character from typesetting or transcription rather than meaningful text.
Rye was the everyday bread grain of northern Europe and, in America, of the colder colonies and the poorer table; wheat was the aspirational flour, which is why this entry is written as a deviation from wheat bread rather than on its own terms. The overnight sponge it borrows is the older of the two American bread methods, predating reliable commercial yeast: a wet ferment left to work all night built both leavening power and flavour, and it survived in cookbooks well past the point when compressed yeast made it unnecessary. Rye's reputation as the bread of hard times and mixed grains, sometimes stretched with cornmeal into what New Englanders called rye-and-injun, is generally traced to exactly this kind of substitution economy.