Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Excellent Bread
Excellent Bread
Mrs. Geo. W. Pitkin.
Four potatoes mashed fine, four teaspoons of salt, two quarts of lukewarm milk, one-half cake compressed yeast dissolved in one-half cup of warm water, flour enough to make a pliable dough; mould with hands well greased with lard; place in pans, and when sufficiently light, it is ready for baking.
A plain potato bread built on a very large sponge of milk — this is a batch for a household, not a single loaf. The original assumes you know your own oven and gives no temperature or time at all.
- Scale it downTwo quarts of milk plus mashed potato will absorb a great deal of flour, likely 18 cups or more, and yields something like five to seven standard loaves; the recipe only says "flour enough to make a pliable dough," so go by feel. Halving or quartering the whole formula works without adjustment.
- "Four potatoes" is ambiguousThe size is anyone's guess. Aim for about 1 to 1 1/4 cups of plain mashed potato per quart of milk, unseasoned and free of lumps; more than that makes the crumb gummy.
- Compressed yeastA modern cake of compressed (fresh) yeast is about 0.6 oz, and a whole cake corresponds to roughly one packet of dry yeast, so half a cake is on the order of half a packet, about 1 teaspoon. Period cakes were not standardised and were often larger, so treat this as an estimate. If using instant, it can go straight into the flour rather than being dissolved.
- Milk temperature is the hingeLukewarm means blood heat, around 100F. Milk much above about 130F starts to kill the yeast, and modern pasteurised milk needs no scalding; the original's insistence on lukewarm suggests milk that might have been either colder or hotter than that when it reached the bowl.
- Greased hands, not flouredMoulding with lard-greased hands instead of dusting with flour keeps the dough from drying out and stiffening. Any neutral fat or butter does the same job; the loaves will have a slightly richer crust for it.
- "Sufficiently light"The shaped loaves should roughly double and hold a shallow dent when pressed. Potato doughs proof faster than plain white dough and can overshoot; watch the pans, not the clock.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F to 400F for 35 to 45 minutes for a standard loaf pan, until the loaf sounds hollow and reads about 195F to 200F inside.
- No sugarNothing sweetens this beyond the potato, whose starch breaks down into sugars the yeast can use. The bread browns less than a sugared dough, so judge doneness by internal temperature rather than colour.
Potato bread was standing practice in nineteenth-century American kitchens long before it was a specialty item: mashed potato and its cooking water fed the yeast, held moisture so the loaf stayed soft for days, and stretched expensive wheat flour with something cheap. Recipes of this era often begin with a potato "emptyings" or salt-rising ferment, and the appearance here of half a cake of compressed yeast marks a turning point — commercial compressed yeast became widely available to American home bakers in the last quarter of the century, and reliable packaged yeast is what allows this recipe to be four lines long instead of two days' work. The attribution to Mrs. Geo. W. Pitkin is typical of the book's method: The Home Cook Book (generally dated to Chicago, 1874, and published for the benefit of the Home for the Friendless) was assembled from contributions by named local women, one of the earliest and most imitated American community cookbooks.