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Wheat Bread
Mrs. D. W. Thatcher.
Take a pan of flour, and put in a small handful of sa and a bowl of soft yeast and one pint of lukewarm mill mix stiff with flour and let it rise. Then knead it int pans, and let it rise, and if wanted very white, knead down two or three times; this makes it whiter, but los its sweet taste; bake forty-five minutes.
This is a working baker's shorthand rather than a formula: the quantities are given in vessels the writer had on her own shelf, and the text as printed has lost a few letters to the typesetter. Read it as a method and supply your own weights.
- The garbled words"A small handful of sa" is salt, "one pint of lukewarm mill" is milk, and "los its sweet taste" is loses. None of these change the sense of the recipe.
- "A pan of flour" and "a bowl of yeast"Neither is recoverable as a measurement; a nineteenth-century bread pan might hold anywhere from two to six quarts. Work backwards from the liquid instead: one pint of milk carries roughly 5 to 6 cups of flour, about 1.5 to 1.75 lb, plus a scant tablespoon of salt.
- Soft yeastThis means a home-kept liquid yeast, commonly a hop-and-potato ferment, poured by the bowl or teacupful. A packet of active dry yeast (2 1/4 tsp) proofed in a little of the warm milk does the same job, though the flavour will be flatter and the rise faster.
- Scald the milk, or don'tPeriod cookbooks often direct that milk be scalded and cooled to lukewarm, both to keep it and to deactivate proteins that slacken dough; this recipe asks only for lukewarm milk. Pasteurised milk needs only to be warmed to about 100F.
- The sponge stage"Mix stiff with flour and let it rise" is a firm sponge, not a finished dough. Give it until doubled and domed, an hour or so with modern yeast and considerably longer with a wild ferment, then knead in the balance of the flour.
- The whiteness trickKnocking back two or three extra times will lighten the crumb colour by giving a finer, more even cell structure, and the author is honest that it costs you flavour.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Forty-five minutes suits a moderately quick oven, about 375 to 400F, for a standard loaf pan; test for an internal temperature near 200F rather than trusting the clock.
- YieldThe pint of milk gives two modest loaves in 8 1/2-inch pans, or one large one baked closer to an hour.
Recipes like this one are why community cookbooks of the 1870s read so oddly to us: The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributions by named housewives, and Mrs. Thatcher was writing for readers who already baked bread weekly and needed only to know what made hers different. The variable here is the yeast. Before commercially compressed yeast became reliable and cheap in North American kitchens in the last quarter of the century, a household kept its own "soft" or "emptins" yeast alive in a crock, and a bowlful was as precise a measure as anyone needed. The remark about kneading down for whiteness reflects a period preoccupation: white bread carried real status, so cooks reached for technique to get a paleness their flour would not give them. Her admission that it costs the loaf its sweet taste is the sort of candour that makes these subscription cookbooks worth reading.