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Superior Bread
Mrs. D. C. Norton.
Scald one quart of sour milk; when cool enough, set your sponge with the whey; take about three quarts of flour, make a hole in the centre, put in the whey about a good teaspoon of salt, one teacup of good hop yeast (home made is best), and stir quite stiff with a spoon; wrap in a thick cloth so as to keep as warm as possible in cold weather, in summer it is not necessary In t morning knead well, adding flour until stiff enough, ar keep warm until light; then set it in pans to rise; saleratus is needed. Bread made in this way will nev fail to be good if good flour and yeast are used.
A late nineteenth-century overnight sponge bread built on the whey drained from scalded sour milk and a cup of hop yeast. The text as printed is damaged in two places, and one of the gaps changes the meaning of the recipe.
- The hinge: it is a two-stage spongeA loose batter-sponge set at night and left to work in a warm wrap, then stiffened with flour in the morning. A short sponge gives a denser, blander loaf; the long ferment is where much of the flavour comes from.
- "Saleratus is needed" is a printer's gap"Saleratus is needed" may be a printer's gap: the sentence could have read "no saleratus is needed" — saleratus being potassium (later sodium) bicarbonate, routinely added to sour-milk breads to neutralise the acid. Since the whey has been separated from the curd and then fermented overnight, soda is arguably unnecessary, and an excess would tend to give a soapy, yellowish crumb. The reading is conjecture; the page as printed says only "saleratus is needed."
- Sour milk and wheySour milk here means milk clabbered at room temperature, which pasteurised milk will not do reliably. Scalding a quart of clabbered milk or cultured buttermilk until it breaks and straining it yields somewhere in the region of two to three cups of whey — the recipe does not say — and it is that liquid, not the curd, that sets the sponge.
- Hop yeastA homemade barm of hops, potato and flour, kept alive on the shelf. A teacup in receipts of this period is reckoned variously, roughly four to eight fluid ounces; a mature sourdough starter of pourable consistency is the nearest equivalent. About 2 teaspoons of active dry yeast will raise a dough of this size, though it works faster.
- Measuring flour by volumeThree quarts is twelve cups, roughly 3 lb / 1.4 kg, but the amount is deliberately approximate — the morning kneading adds flour "until stiff enough." Hold back a cup or two.
- "Keep as warm as possible"Somewhere warmer than the winter room, near a banked range; no temperature is recorded. A turned-off oven with the light on, or a proofing box in the region of 75-80F, serves the same purpose; a colder spot simply slows the sponge overnight.
- No baking instructions are givenThe book assumes the cook knows her own oven. Twelve cups of flour makes two large or three medium loaves; bake at 400-425F for 35-45 minutes, until the loaves sound hollow and read about 200F at the centre.
Before packaged yeast reached ordinary kitchens, much American bread rose on a liquid leaven the cook kept herself: hop yeast, a boiled infusion of hops thickened with flour or mashed potato and refreshed every week or two. Hops contributed bitterness and, as a mild antibacterial, some protection against the souring organisms that could turn a jar of barm rank. Recipes of this kind — sour milk scalded, the whey saved, the curd used elsewhere — also reflect a household where milk arrived raw and unrefrigerated and clabbered on its own, so nothing was thrown out. This loaf carries Mrs. D. C. Norton's name because it was her particular formula, vouched for by her: "will never fail to be good if good flour and yeast are used" is a claim staked on personal reputation rather than tested method. Within a generation compressed and then dry yeast made the hop jar obsolete, and recipes like this one dropped out of print.