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White Bread
1½ teaspoons salt 1 tablespoon sugar Follow general directions. 1 yeast cake mixed with cup lukewarm water 6 cups flour To make potato bread, add 2 cups mashed potatoes to the liquids. Use only 1 cup liquid and less flour is needed.
This is a skeleton recipe: it assumes you have already read the "general directions" for bread at the head of the chapter, so the liquid quantity, kneading, rising and baking are all left out. Here is what the missing scaffolding looks like in a modern kitchen.
- The missing liquidThe ingredient list gives no total liquid beyond the cup of water used to soften the yeast, and the potato variation says to "use only 1 cup liquid" — which implies the plain loaf normally takes about 2 cups. Six cups of flour to roughly 2 cups of water or scalded-and-cooled milk is the standard ratio for this style; treat the figure as inferred, not stated.
- One yeast cakeA yeast cake here is compressed fresh yeast, commonly around 0.6 oz, though cake sizes varied. Substitute one 2¼-teaspoon packet of active dry yeast, softened in the cup of lukewarm water — meaning 105–110F, warm to a fingertip and no warmer.
- Flour has changedHousehold flour of this period was softer and thirstier in different ways than modern bread flour. Hold back the last half cup of the six and add it only as the dough demands; you want a dough that is tacky but clears the side of the bowl.
- Rising timesThe general directions of the era usually call for a first rise until doubled — about 1 to 1½ hours at 75F — a punch down, shaping, and a second rise in the pans until doubled again, 45 minutes to an hour. Cold kitchens will roughly double both.
- Oven temperatureThe page gives no oven instruction; that sits in the general directions. In a modern oven, 400–425F for the first 15 minutes, then 375F for another 25–30. The loaf is done at an internal temperature of about 195–200F, which is a better test than tapping the bottom.
- The potato variationMash the potatoes plain — no butter, milk or salt beyond what the recipe gives — and use them warm rather than hot, so they do not kill the yeast. Potato starch holds water, so potato bread tends to stay soft longer than the plain loaf; the dough will also feel stickier and needs a lighter hand with added flour.
- YieldSix cups of flour makes two standard 8½ x 4½-inch loaves, or one large pan loaf plus a small one. Turn them out of the pans immediately and cool on a rack, or the sides go damp.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given away to policyholders, part of a broad early twentieth-century campaign in which insurers, gas companies and flour millers all published free domestic advice on the theory that healthier, thriftier households were better customers. That purpose shows in the writing: the recipe is stripped to a list of proportions with a cross-reference to the chapter's general method, because the book is teaching one technique and then ringing changes on it rather than presenting each loaf as a separate project. The potato variation was standard household practice long before it was a bakery trend — mashed potato and its cooking water were understood to feed the yeast and keep the crumb moist, and in periods when wheat was dear or rationed, potato was also a way to stretch the flour barrel.