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Yeast (Pare and boil four)
Pare and boil four ordinary-sized potatoes, boiling at the same time in a separate vessel a good handful of hops. When the potatoes are done, mash fine and add, after straining, the water in which the hops were boiled; put into this one cup white sugar and onehalf cup salt, and add sufficient water to make one gallon; when cold add one cup of good yeast, let stand in a warm place for a few hours until it will "sing" on being stirred, when it is ready for use. Keep covered in a cellar or cool place. - Mrs. C. M.
This is a liquid bread yeast, the kind a household kept going from week to week before packaged yeast was reliably available. It is usable, but treat it as a wet starter with a short life rather than a shelf-stable product.
- The hinge: add the yeast only when coldThe hinge: add the yeast only when the liquid is cool -- yeast is damaged by heat and killed outright at around 130F, so the gallon of potato-hop liquid must come down to lukewarm or cooler before the cup of yeast goes in. The recipe says "when cold"; erring on the cool side costs only time.
- "Sing" means active fermentation"Sing" most likely means active fermentation -- stirring a working batch releases carbon dioxide with a faint hiss or fizz. That is the sign to move it to the cellar. The recipe allows a few hours in a warm place; how long it actually takes will depend on the vigour of the starting yeast.
- HopsA good handful is perhaps 1/2 to 1 oz of dried hops; the recipe does not say how much water to boil them in, or for how long. They are there less for flavour than for their resins, which inhibit the lactic bacteria that would otherwise turn the jar to vinegar. Whole dried hops from a homebrew supplier are the closest thing to what was meant.
- The salt is highHalf a cup in a gallon is close to 4 per cent, far more than flavour needs. It will slow fermentation and help the batch keep in a cool cellar, and bread set with it will need little added salt. If you have refrigeration, you can cut it back.
- You need a starting yeastThis recipe propagates an existing culture; it does not create one. "One cup of good yeast" meant a cup of any sound working yeast, often held back from a previous batch. A cup of unfed sourdough starter thinned with water, or a packet of dry yeast slurried in warm water, will get it going.
- Storage and lifeKeep it covered but not sealed tight, in a jar with headroom, and stir before dipping. The recipe asks only for a cellar or cool place and gives no temperature. Refrigerated it will keep a couple of weeks; it separates, which is normal.
- How much to useOld rule of thumb is about one cup of liquid yeast per quart of flour in a sponge set overnight. It is far weaker than modern dry yeast and works slowly, so plan on a long rise.
- YieldOne gallon, a large quantity intended to be drawn on across several bakings. Quarter the recipe unless you bake constantly.
Potato-and-hop yeast is a workhorse of nineteenth-century American baking, and regional cookbooks of the period commonly carry versions of it under a "Yeast" heading. The logic is simple: boiled potato supplies starch and a little sugar for the culture to feed on, hops keep spoilage bacteria down, sugar feeds the yeast, and salt slows the whole thing so the jar survives a week in the cellar. Commercially compressed yeast is generally traced to Fleischmann's, whose product reached a wide American audience in the 1870s, but it spread unevenly and cost money, so cooks went on setting their own well into the century's end and passed working cultures along to neighbours. That a recipe of this kind is signed only "Mrs. C. M." is characteristic of the community-contributed cookbook: the version printed was somebody's particular one.