Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Bread
Bread
M. E. B. Lynde.
The sponge is made over night in the centre of a pan of flour, with milk and warm water and a cup of homemade hop and potato yeast to about four loaves. The yeast is put in when about half the flour and water are mixed, and then the remainder of the water is added and the sponge beaten with a wooden spoon for fifteen minutes and left to rise over night in a moderately warm place. In the morning, the bread-dough mixed and kneaded for half an hour, adding flour to make a stiff dough, and left to rise in a mass. It is then made into small loaves, being kneaded with as little flour as possible, and put in pans to rise the second time, all the while kept moderately warm and when light bake in a moderately hot oven. The important part of said recipe is the beating of the sponge fifteen minutes, as given.
A contributed sponge-and-dough bread with no weights or volumes given at all — the writer assumed her reader already knew what four loaves' worth of flour looked like. The one instruction she does insist on is the fifteen-minute beating of the sponge, and she is right to.
- Beat the sponge, and mean itFifteen minutes of vigorous beating with a wooden spoon develops gluten in a very wet batter and aerates it, which helps give the finished loaf a springy crumb. A stand mixer on medium will do much the same work in a fraction of the time; the sponge should be smooth, elastic and pulling away in strands.
- Quantities are not givenNothing is measured here. For four loaves of about 1 1/2 lb each, reckon on something in the region of 3 1/2 to 4 lb of flour with liquid to suit; scale up if you want the larger loaves. By her own description about half the flour and water go into the overnight sponge. Adjust by feel, as she plainly did.
- Hop and potato yeastA homemade liquid yeast, kept going in a jar and fed with hop tea and boiled potato. It was weaker and more variable than modern yeast. In place of one cup, use about 2 tsp instant or active dry yeast for the whole batch — the overnight sponge supplies the flavour the old yeast was prized for.
- "Moderately warm"Around 70-75F for the overnight sponge. Warmer than that and a sponge left twelve hours will over-ferment and turn sour and slack.
- "A moderately hot oven"375 to 400F for loaves in pans, 35 to 45 minutes. An internal temperature of 200-205F is the reliable test; the old rule of a hollow sound when the bottom is tapped works too.
- Half an hour of kneadingReasonable for a stiff dough worked by hand on a board, but not necessary. After a well-beaten sponge, 10 to 12 minutes by hand or 6 to 8 in a mixer brings the dough to a smooth windowpane.
- "Rise in a mass" and "when light"The bulk rise runs until roughly doubled, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours; the shaped loaves are "light" when a fingertip dent springs back slowly and leaves a faint mark. Under-proofed loaves from this method bake dense and split at the side.
- Flour on the second shapingHer caution to knead the loaves "with as little flour as possible" matters. Extra flour worked in at shaping shows up as dry streaks and grey seams in the finished crumb.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, first published in 1874 and reprinted through the later 1870s) was compiled from recipes solicited from named contributors — hence "M. E. B. Lynde" at the head of this one — and sold for charity, a format that spread through American church and hospital fundraising for the next half century. The result reads like overheard kitchen talk rather than instruction: no weights, no times for the risings, and an insistence on the one detail the contributor considered her own discovery. The sponge method she describes, in which a loose batter is set overnight and the stiff dough mixed the next morning, was standard practice while households kept their own yeast alive, and hop-and-potato yeast was one of several domestic preparations in use alongside salt-rising, milk and other home ferments: hops discouraged spoilage organisms and the potato fed the ferment. Commercial compressed yeast was already being sold in the 1870s and within a generation had made the overnight sponge, and the perpetual yeast jar behind it, largely unnecessary.