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Rye Bread (Make a sponge of one quart)
Make a sponge of one quart warm water, one tea cup yeast, thickened with rye flour; put in warm place to rise over night; scald one pint corn meal; when cool add it to sponge, and add rye flour till thick enough to knead, knead but little, let rise, meld into loaves, place in deep pie-tins or small pudding-pans, let rise and bake; or, thicken the sponge with rye flour, and proceed as above. .
Wheat sponge may be used instead of rye. -Mrs. Eliza T. Carson , Delaware, Ohio.
A two-stage overnight bread of the old "rye and Indian" type, written for a cook who kept a jar of liquid yeast on the shelf and judged the oven by hand. Almost everything it leaves out is a number.
- The yeast"One tea cup yeast" means about 6-8 oz of homemade liquid yeast — a thin, actively fermenting slurry, not modern granules. Substituting: a scant teaspoon of instant or active dry yeast, or 6-8 oz of a lively 100%-hydration sourdough starter, will carry a quart of water through an overnight rise in a cool room. A full packet is far too much for twelve hours.
- Warm, not hot"Warm water" here means about blood temperature, roughly 100F. Water much hotter than that damages the yeast, and above roughly 140F it is killed.
- Scalding the corn mealPour boiling water over the pint of cornmeal, or cook it briefly to a thick mush, and let it cool to lukewarm before it meets the sponge. The scald gelatinises the starch so the meal absorbs water and does not stay gritty; adding it hot would scald the yeast.
- Indian meal"Corn meal" in this period generally meant stone-ground yellow or white meal, coarser than modern degerminated supermarket cornmeal and more absorbent. Expect to need slightly less rye flour if you use a fine, dry modern meal.
- Knead but littleThis is the hinge. Rye has little gluten and its pentosans turn slack and sticky under working; extended kneading makes the dough gummy rather than stronger. Bring it together, let it rest, and shape with wet or floured hands.
- The pans"Deep pie-tins or small pudding-pans" means round tins with some depth — a 6- or 7-inch cake pan or a small souffle dish is a reasonable modern stand-in. Rye-and-corn dough spreads if left free-standing, so the walls matter.
- OvenNo temperature is given. In a modern oven, around 400F falling toward 375F for 50-70 minutes suits a loaf of this weight and density; the loaf is done at an internal 200-205F and sounds hollow underneath.
- CoolingRye loaves cut best the day after baking. Sliced warm, the crumb is still setting and will drag and gum on the knife.
- YieldA quart of water plus a pint of meal makes a large batch — several loaves rather than one or two.
Rye and cornmeal bread was the everyday loaf of much of the northern and eastern United States before cheap Midwestern wheat displaced it, known in New England as "rye and Injun" — Indian meal being the standard nineteenth-century term for cornmeal. Both grains were grown where wheat did poorly, and both are low in the gluten that makes a light wheat loaf, so the two were leavened together with an overnight sponge that gave the slow-working yeast time to raise a heavy dough. That The Dixie Cook Book carries the recipe under the name of a contributor from Delaware, Ohio, is a reminder of how these compiled community cookbooks worked: the title advertised a region, but the book derived from an Ohio compilation, and a northern farm bread sits perfectly comfortably among the beaten biscuits.