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Yeast (V)
Mrs. John A. Fraser.
Monday-boil two ounces of hops in four quarts of water for half an hour, strain it, and let it stand till cold, then put in a small handful of salt and half a pound of sugar, beat up one pound of flour, with some of the liquor, mix all together. On Wednesday boil and mash three pounds of potatoes and add to it, let it stand till Thursday, then bottle and it is ready for use; shake well before using. To be kept warm while making, and in a cool place after.
This is a hop-and-potato barm — a wild-yeast starter kept alive from batch to batch and used to raise bread. It takes four days from Monday to Thursday, and most of that time is fermentation, not work.
- What it actually isNot commercial yeast but a liquid leaven, raised by wild yeasts from the air and from the flour and potatoes themselves. Period recipes generally call for something on the order of half a cup to a cup of such barm per batch of bread, and the rise is much longer than with modern yeast; no exact equivalence to a packet can be given.
- The hops are not optionalTwo ounces of hops in four quarts of water is a strongly bittered, mildly antiseptic brew. The bitter acids inhibit many of the bacteria that would otherwise spoil a jar of sugared potato water, which is part of why such barms keep as long as they do. Any bittering hop, pellet or whole leaf, will serve; the bitterness carries through faintly into the bread.
- Temperature is the hinge"To be kept warm while making" means comfortably warm rather than hot; a cool room slows the ferment and lets souring organisms gain, while real heat favours bacteria over yeast. After bottling, cool storage — a refrigerator now — extends its usable life, though how long depends on the batch.
- Bottling with live fermentA sealed glass bottle of actively fermenting barm builds pressure and can burst. Use a jar with a loose lid or an airlock, and vent it daily. The instruction to shake before use is because the yeast settles into a thick sediment.
- Add the potatoes coolBoiled, mashed potato added while hot will kill the ferment already working in the flour-and-hop liquor. Let it come down to lukewarm first.
- Weighing the flourA pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; three pounds of potatoes is six to eight medium ones. Half a pound of sugar is a little over a cup — it is feed for the yeast, not sweetening.
- Signs it workedBy Wednesday the surface should be foaming and smell yeasty and slightly beery. A sharp solvent or vinegar smell suggests the ferment is out of balance; any fuzzy or coloured growth means the batch has spoiled, and it should be discarded rather than baked with.
- YieldAbout four quarts, far more than a modern household bakes through. Halving or quartering the whole recipe works without adjustment.
Hop yeast of this kind was the standard leaven in North American and British kitchens before packaged compressed yeast became widely available in the later nineteenth century, and it persisted in home cookbooks for decades after. The word barm originally meant the foam skimmed off fermenting beer, and households near a brewery simply bought or begged it; those without one made their own, as here, borrowing the brewer's hops for the same preservative reason. Potatoes appear because their starch feeds the yeast vigorously and their bulk gives the barm body. The multi-day schedule keyed to named weekdays — start Monday, bottle Thursday — is characteristic of a period when baking was a fixed point in the domestic week rather than an impulse, and a cook needed her leaven ready on a particular morning. Mrs. John A. Fraser is one of the many contributing subscribers whose names run through The Home Cook Book, a Toronto charity compilation of 1877 assembled to raise funds for the Hospital for Sick Children.