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Third
Mix the yeast with ¼ cup lukewarm liquid, using yeast according to the time desired for the process. If the bread is to be allowed to rise overnight use 1/4 yeast cake to 1 pint liquid or 1/3 yeast cake to 1 quart liquid. For bread mixed and baked during the day use 1 yeast cake to 1 pint liquid. If dry yeast is used, mix it with a little lukewarm liquid and flour several hours before adding to the sponge.
Fourth. Add the yeast mixture to the lukewarm liquid mixture.
This is the middle of a general bread method rather than a standalone formula: it covers only the step of waking the yeast and joining it to the liquid. The useful content is the ratio of yeast to liquid, which is where old bread instructions differ most from modern ones.
- Missing fractionsThe two overnight ratios read "use yeast cake to 1 pint" and "yeast cake to 1 quart" with the quantities dropped in printing. Almost certainly these were fractions — typically a quarter or a half cake — since the whole point is that a long, cool rise needs less yeast than a same-day one. Do not read them as whole cakes.
- What a yeast cake wasA compressed fresh yeast cake of this period ran roughly 0.6 oz. One cake is close to one 2 1/4-teaspoon packet (7 g) of modern active dry yeast, or about 1 3/4 teaspoons of instant. For the same-day method — 1 cake to 1 pint of liquid — that is a brisk, fast dough by current standards.
- Dry yeast then and nowThe "dry yeast" referred to here is old-style granular or cake dry yeast, which was slow and unreliable and genuinely needed a several-hour head start with flour and warm liquid. Modern active dry yeast needs about ten minutes in warm liquid; instant yeast can go straight into the flour.
- Lukewarm means 100-110FAim for 100-110F for hydrating yeast. Much above 120F risks damaging it, and cold liquid simply stalls the process. A thermometer removes the guesswork the original cook did by wrist.
- Pints and quartsA pint here is 2 cups, a quart 4 cups. As a rough guide, 2 cups of liquid takes roughly 6 to 7 cups of flour, which gives two standard loaves.
- Sponge"The sponge" is the loose, batter-like first mix of liquid, yeast and part of the flour, left to ferment before the rest of the flour and the salt go in. It is not a modern preferment recipe by another name; it is the whole dough at an early stage.
- Overnight risingAn overnight rise was done in a cool kitchen or larder, not a heated modern room. If you use the reduced-yeast overnight ratio, refrigerate the dough or keep it below about 65F, or it will overproof and collapse before morning.
Bread instructions written as numbered stages — first the scalded and cooled liquid, then the yeast, then the sponge — reflect a period when yeast strength was the cook's biggest variable. Compressed yeast cakes, sold fresh and perishable from the 1870s onward, were a considerable advance on the homemade potato or hop yeasts that preceded them, but they still lost vigor quickly, which is why a book like this bothers to give separate ratios for an overnight rise and a same-day one. The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given free to policyholders as part of a broad campaign of domestic and health advice; its bread section is deliberately schematic, teaching a method that could be scaled rather than a single loaf, on the assumption that the household baked its own bread as a matter of routine.