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Sixth
Put dough in a bowl, cover closely, put in a warm (not hot) place and let rise to double its bulk. This may be overnight or in the daytime, depending on the quantity of yeast used. During the rising, ordinary room temperature, from 68 to 75°F., should be kept. The length of time required for rising depends upon the room temperature; the process may be hastened by increasing the temperature from 75 to 88°F.
This is one numbered step from the book's method for plain yeast bread — the bulk rise. The temperatures given are still sound; almost everything else about the way we buy and use yeast has changed.
- The yeast is the variable, not the clockThe instruction to let the dough rise "overnight or in the daytime, depending on the quantity of yeast used" points to adjusting the amount of yeast rather than the schedule; in this period that would most likely mean using more or less of a cake of compressed yeast. With modern instant or active dry yeast, a batch using about 2 teaspoons per 4 cups of flour should double in roughly 2 hours at 70F; cutting it to about 1/4 teaspoon suits an overnight rise.
- 68 to 75F is the useful rangeThis is still the standard advice. Below about 65F fermentation slows sharply and the dough may not double in a working day; much above 80F it ferments quickly and the flavour tends to suffer.
- The 88F upper limitPushing to 88F to hurry things along works, but it costs flavour, and dough held near that temperature can overproof between one check and the next. Watch the dough rather than the clock at those temperatures.
- "A warm (not hot) place"The warning against hot spots matters because a place close to a hot stove can climb well past the useful range and, if hot enough, kill the yeast outright. A turned-off oven with the light on, or an oven warmed briefly and switched off, will usually sit somewhere around 80F, though this varies by oven.
- Cover closelyThe point is to stop the surface drying into a skin that tears during shaping. A plate, a shower cap or plastic wrap will do it.
- Judging "double its bulk"A straight-sided container with a mark on the outside is more reliable than eyeballing a mixing bowl. The dough should also hold a shallow dent when pressed with a fingertip rather than springing straight back.
- What comes nextThis step ends with the dough at full volume; it is not ready for the tin. A bread method of this kind normally knocks the dough down and gives it a second rise after shaping, so do not skip ahead to baking.
The precise Fahrenheit figures here point toward an early twentieth-century book rather than a nineteenth-century one, though the line is not a sharp one, since nineteenth-century manuals did sometimes give thermometer readings of their own. Older manuals more often told the cook to set the dough "where it will keep warm" and left the rest to judgement; by the 1900s domestic-science teaching, generally associated with institutions like the Boston Cooking School and the land-grant home economics departments, was making the household thermometer a more familiar tool and reframing bread as a controlled fermentation with a stated temperature range. The choice offered between an overnight rise and a daytime one also reflects the older habit of setting bread at night with a small amount of yeast — back in the days of homemade or barm yeast, when a slow, cool rise was usually what the leavening allowed, and one that has come back into favour with cooks who like the flavour a long ferment builds.