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Sponge for Winter Use
Peel and boil four or five medium-sized potatoes in two quarts of water (which will boil down to one quart by thet ime the potatoes are cooked): when done, take out and press through a colander, or mash very fine in the crock in which the sponge is to be made; make a well in the center, into which put one cup of flour, and pour over it the boiling water from the potatoes; stir thoroughly, and when cool add a pint of tepid water, flour enough to make a thin batter, and a cup of yeast. This sponge makes very moist bread.
This is a pre-ferment, not a finished loaf: the potato water and flour are mixed the night before, and the next morning the sponge is turned into dough with more flour and salt. Two things in it need translating for a modern kitchen — the "cup of yeast" and the scald.
- The hinge: scald, then coolThe cup of flour in the well is deliberately cooked by the boiling potato water, which gelatinises the starch and helps give the moist crumb the recipe promises. Let the batter cool to genuinely tepid — hand-warm, around 100F or below — before the yeast goes in; added to hot batter the yeast will be damaged or killed.
- A cup of yeastThis means a cup of homemade liquid yeast, the potato- or hop-based ferment many nineteenth-century households kept going, not granulated yeast. A cup of active sourdough starter or a well-fed liquid poolish is the nearest equivalent; if using commercial yeast, roughly 1 teaspoon of instant yeast will do similar work, with the missing liquid made up in water.
- The potato water is the pointBoiling two quarts down to one concentrates the dissolved starch and minerals from the potatoes, which support the ferment. Do not drain the potatoes into the sink and start again with fresh water — measure the reduced cooking liquid, and top up to a quart if it has gone too far.
- Crock and volumeThe recipe calls only for a crock. Since the sponge will rise and may roughly double, use a container comfortably larger than the batter and cover it with a cloth rather than a sealed lid.
- "Thin batter"Aim for the consistency of thick pancake batter — it should fall from the spoon in a ribbon, not hold a shape. In practice that is somewhere around 4 to 5 cups of flour against the quart of potato water and pint of tepid water, but flour absorbency varies and the visual cue is more reliable than the number.
- Why "for winter use"The title points to a cold kitchen, where fermentation is slow and a long rise is safe. A modern warm kitchen ferments it considerably faster, and it can over-ripen and smell sharply of alcohol if left too long; either set it in a cool spot or start it later in the evening.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, but the quart of potato water plus a pint of water and the flour to thicken it make a substantial quantity of sponge, enough for several loaves once more flour is worked in. No salt is mentioned; in this style of recipe it would be added when the sponge is made into dough.
Potato sponges were widely used in American household bread through the nineteenth century, and The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) prints the method. Before reliable packaged yeast, a baker kept a living culture alive from week to week, and potato water was valued because its starch and minerals kept a wild or heirloom yeast vigorous when plain flour-and-water sponges went sluggish, hence the title. The distinction between a "winter" and a "summer" sponge in these books is often a matter of fermentation speed: the same batter that needs a warm corner and a full night in January will sour by breakfast in July. Compressed cake yeast reached American grocers in quantity in the 1870s and 1880s and gradually made this two-day rhythm optional, but recipes like this one survived in print for decades afterward.