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Yeast for Bread
Miss L. Stagman.
Grate ten or twelve good sized raw potatoes in a colander and let the water drip off them, and then add three parts of a saucerful of flour to the potatoes, and three parts of a cup of sugar; then boil a good pinch of hops twenty minutes and throw over all; when lukewarm add a cup of yeast, and when it rises add a tablespoonful of salt. This will keep three weeks.
This is a perpetual bread starter, not a dough: a hop-flavoured potato ferment kept in the cellar and drawn on a cupful at a time. Two things decide whether it works — the temperature when the yeast goes in, and how cool it is kept afterwards.
- The hinge: lukewarm means lukewarmThe boiling hop water is poured over the grated potato and flour to scald the starch. Wait until the mixture has cooled to blood heat before adding the cup of yeast; if it goes in hot, the yeast may be killed and the batch will spoil rather than ferment.
- "Three parts of a saucerful"Probably three-quarters of a saucer of flour; the sugar the recipe already gives as three parts of a cup, i.e. about three-quarters of a cup. The measure is genuinely loose, and the ferment tolerates it.
- Ten or twelve potatoesGrated raw and drained; the water that drips off is discarded and only the pulp is used.
- HopsDried hop flowers, sold whole by homebrew suppliers. They contribute bitterness and, more importantly, resins that suppress spoilage bacteria while the yeast works -- the reason the starter keeps at all.
- "A cup of yeast"Not dried or compressed yeast in the modern sense but a cup of liquid ferment: barm, or a portion held back from an earlier batch.
- Salt goes in lastSalt is added only after the ferment has risen, because it slows yeast activity.
- Keeping it three weeksThat figure assumes a cold cellar or larder. In a modern kitchen, keep it covered in the refrigerator, and expect it to separate — stir before drawing off. Discard it if it smells of acetone, cheese or mould rather than sour bread.
- Using itReckon on about a cup of the liquid per two-loaf batch of bread, with the dough left to rise correspondingly longer than a packet-yeast dough -- often overnight.
Before reliable compressed yeast reached ordinary kitchens, a cook either bought barm from a brewer or kept her own ferment, and hop-and-potato yeast was one of the common domestic versions in Britain and North America in the nineteenth century. The potato supplies starch and the sugar a quick meal for the yeast, while the hops act as a preservative, and the reason this starter was expected to last weeks rather than days. Recipes like this one are often contributed rather than authorial, each signed with a subscriber's name, so the collection preserves a dozen slightly different household methods for the same thing. In time, packaged yeast made the whole practice optional, and the hop ferment survived mainly in rural kitchens and, later, in the sourdough revival.