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Home-Made Bread
Mash four medium-sized, well boiled potatoes in an earthen bowl, four tablespoonfuls of flour, one-half teaspoonful salt, one teaspoonful of sugar, pour over it, stirring meanwhile, a quart of boiling water. Set the mixture aside until it gets luke warm, then pour into it half a teacupful of liquid yeast; stir well, cover closely and let stand till light. When it is perfectly light and foamy, which will be in about five hours if kept at the proper temperature, add a half pint of warm sweet milk. Stir in sifted flour until a dough is formed sufficiently stiff to be turned from the mixing bowl to the molding board in a mass; then proceed to knead well, adding flour until it ceases to stick to the fingers or the molding board. At the end of that time form into loaves or rolls; put into greased pans, brush the surface with melted butter and again set to rise for an hour, or bread should be put to bake as soon as it is light enough.
A potato-water sponge bread from the era before packaged yeast, when a baker kept a jar of liquid yeast going on the shelf. The original gives no oven temperature and no flour quantity, so both need filling in.
- Liquid yeastHalf a teacupful is perhaps 1/4 to 1/3 cup, teacup measures being unstandardised, of a homemade hop-or-potato yeast, weaker than modern yeast. Substitute 1 packet (2 1/4 tsp) active dry or instant yeast, and expect the sponge to be foamy in 1 to 2 hours rather than five.
- Order of operationsPut the mashed potato, flour, salt and sugar in the bowl first, then pour the boiling quart over while stirring. The boiling water gelatinises the starch, which is what gives this bread its moist crumb and long keeping.
- Lukewarm means 95-110FLukewarm means blood heat, roughly 95-105F -- Adding yeast to the potato mixture while it is still hot will kill it. Let it drop to blood heat before the yeast goes in; a quart of boiling liquid in an earthen bowl may take an hour or more to get there.
- Sweet milkFresh, unsoured milk as opposed to buttermilk. Any modern pasteurized whole milk works, warmed to about 100F.
- Flour quantityNot given. With a quart of water plus half a pint of milk, plus the moisture in four potatoes, expect somewhere in the region of 13 to 16 cups of bread flour. Add it in stages and stop when the dough clears the board, as the recipe says, rather than working to a number.
- The missing first rise"At the end of that time" has no antecedent in the text as printed, which suggests an instruction to let the kneaded dough rise has dropped out. Letting it double once in the bowl, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours, before shaping is the usual reading.
- OvenBake at 400F for 30 to 40 minutes for loaves, 15 to 20 for rolls. Done is an internal temperature of 200-205F, not a guess at the crust colour.
- YieldThis is a large batch by modern standards: three or four 9x5-inch loaves, or a mix of loaves and rolls.
Potato bread of this kind was common in nineteenth-century households, and the reason is chemical rather than sentimental. Yeast raised at home on hop water or potato water was unreliable, so bakers gave it a head start with cooked potato starch, which the yeast breaks down more readily than raw flour; the same starch holds water in the finished crumb, so a potato loaf tends to stay soft longer than a plain white one. The half-teacup of "liquid yeast" points to a household that maintained its own culture and measured it by the cup, a practice that persisted alongside compressed and dry yeast well after both were on sale. The five-hour sponge and the vague "kept at the proper temperature" suggest a kitchen where a warm spot was easy to find and an exact temperature was nobody's concern.