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Salt Rising Bread
Mrs. Upham.
At supper time take one-fourth teaspoonful of salt, same of soda, and one teaspoonful of white sugar; over this pour one teacupful of boiling water, and add one cupful of cold water; stir in three dessertspoonfuls of Indian meal and flour enough to make a thick batter, and cover tightly. In cold weather place it where it will be warm all night. In the morning place your bowl in a dish of water as hot as you can hold your finger in. Stir it often and thoroughly for an hour. Sift in a ten quart pan two-thirds full of flour, into it stir enough warm water, one tablespoonful of salt, and one-half teaspoonful soda, to make a thin batter; then stir your yeast in thoroughly and place in a warm place, where no draughts of cold air will reach it. Let it rise to the top of pan.
Salt-rising bread is leavened by a wild bacterial ferment rather than baker's yeast, and it is the fussiest bread in the nineteenth-century repertoire. Mrs. Upham assumes you know how to finish and bake a loaf; she only takes you as far as the risen sponge.
- The hinge is temperatureThe starter wants to be held steadily at roughly 100-110F for its whole life, warm enough that it never cools and never scalds. "As hot as you can hold your finger in" is about that range. A turned-off oven with the light on, a proofing box, or a cooler with jars of warm water all work better than the back of a modern stove.
- Indian mealCornmeal. Use coarse, stone-ground, whole-grain meal rather than degerminated supermarket cornmeal; the bacteria that drive this ferment ride in on the grain, and heavily processed meal often refuses to start at all.
- MeasuresA teacupful in this period is smaller than a modern cup, roughly 3/4 cup, though the recipe is forgiving here. A dessertspoonful is two teaspoons, so three of them is about two tablespoons of meal.
- The ten-quart panTwo-thirds full of sifted flour is on the order of 6 lb or more, a large household batch. Scale the whole thing down proportionally if you want a single loaf, keeping the starter proportions the same.
- What it should smell likeA working starter usually goes foamy in 6-12 hours and smells sharply cheesy, closer to old milk than to bread. That odor is the sign of success, not spoilage. If there is no sign of activity after 12 hours or so, it has most likely failed.
- Rising timeWithout commercial yeast the sponge and the loaves both move slowly. Expect several hours for the pan to rise, and shape into greased loaf tins for a second rise once the batter has doubled.
- Baking, which she omitsBake the risen loaves at 375F for 40-50 minutes, until the crust is deep brown and the interior reads 200-205F. The crumb is dense and close-grained by nature, not a fault.
- A note on the microbiologyThe organism generally credited with raising salt-rising bread is Clostridium perfringens, which in other contexts causes food poisoning. A thoroughly baked loaf reaches temperatures that destroy the vegetative bacteria, which is why the bread has been eaten safely for two centuries. Do not taste the raw sponge, and do not keep a batch that fails to rise.
Salt-rising bread belongs to the American frontier and to the Appalachian and Ohio Valley kitchens in particular, where it was made in households that had no reliable access to brewer's or distiller's yeast and no sourdough culture to maintain. The name is misleading: the salt is not the leavening agent, and the phrase is often said to come from the practice of nesting the starter bowl in a bed of heated salt or of setting it on a warm hearthstone overnight to hold temperature, though this is folk tradition rather than documented etymology. Such recipes were often compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why this appears as Mrs. Upham's method rather than as a standardized formula; each cook's version differed in the meal used and in how the warmth was managed. The bread never went entirely out of production, and a handful of bakeries in West Virginia and western Pennsylvania still turn it out.