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Yeast That Will Not Sour
Mrs. J. B. Adams.
Boil two ounces of hops in two quarts of water; put one cup of brown sugar in a jar; boil and strain the hops and pour into the jar. Add one cup of flour stirred smooth; let it stand in a warm kitchen till it ferments. Add six potatoes boiled and mashed, and one cup of salt.
This is a hop yeast — a liquid leaven kept on hand for bread in the years before compressed yeast was reliably available. The hops and the heavy dose of salt are what the title is promising: both suppress the bacteria that turn a homemade barm sour.
- The hinge: temperature when you add flour and potatoThe hinge: temperature before it is left to ferment -- Many period hop yeasts deliberately scald the flour with the hot liquid, as this one appears to, but the jar must cool to lukewarm (below about 110F) before wild yeast can take hold; and the mashed potato should be cooled the same way before it goes in.
- Two ounces of hopsThat is 2 oz by weight of dried hop flowers or cones, which is a large, loose volume; whole hops are very light. Any bittering variety works; the resins are there chiefly for preservation, and the liquid is bitter and not meant to be tasted.
- "Till it ferments" is the only timing givenIn a kitchen at 70-80F expect 24 to 48 hours before the surface is foaming and the smell turns yeasty and winey. If nothing has happened in three days, it has failed and should be discarded rather than coaxed.
- It relies on wild yeastNothing here inoculates the jar — the recipe assumes a nineteenth-century kitchen with resident yeast in the flour, the air and the crockery. A modern kitchen often has none, which is why these old barm recipes so often refuse to start. A spoonful of an active sourdough starter or a pinch of commercial yeast stirred in with the flour makes the outcome predictable.
- One cup of saltThis is a preservative rather than a seasoning, and it is a great deal. It slows the yeast considerably and it carries through into the bread, so salt in the dough should be reduced or left out entirely when this leaven is used.
- Yield and useYou finish with roughly two quarts of thick liquid yeast. Comparable recipes of the period commonly call for something on the order of a teacupful for a baking of bread, stirred into the sponge at night for baking the next morning. Shake before using; it separates.
- Keeping itStore in a loosely covered jar — a sealed lid can build pressure — in the coldest part of the refrigerator, where it will stay usable for a few weeks. Discard it if it smells cheesy, acetone-like, or shows coloured or fuzzy mould rather than a plain foamy head.
Liquid hop yeast was the ordinary domestic leaven across nineteenth-century North America and Britain, and versions of it appear in community cookbooks of the period, usually differing only in whether the base is potato, flour, or cornmeal. Hops were used because their resins are mildly antibacterial: they hold back the lactic bacteria that would otherwise take over a kitchen barm and make the bread sour and slack, which is exactly the boast in this recipe's title. The potato feeds the yeast a starch it can work on easily, and the salt buys further keeping time. Recipes like this one thinned out over the following generation as reliable compressed yeast became widely sold from the later 1870s, and the home-brewed jar of barm on the kitchen shelf became a memory rather than a weekly chore. Its appearance here, credited to a contributing housekeeper by name, is typical of the subscription cookbook: practical knowledge collected from women who had made the thing themselves and were expected to be recognised for it.