Potato Bread
Three and one-half quarts of sifted flour, one boiled potato, large; one quart of warm water, one teacupful of yeast, or one compressed yeast cake, one even desertspoonful of salt; mix at night, put the flour in a large bowl, hollow a place in the center for the potato mashed, water and salt. Stir in flour enough to make a smooth batter; add yeast, stir in the rest of the flour. Put the dough on the flour board; knead fifteen minutes, using barely enough flour to prevent sticking. Flour the bowl, lay the dough in it, cover and have to rise. In the morning mold into loaves, when light, prick and bake in a moderate oven.
An overnight sponge-free dough that relies on a mashed potato for moisture and a slow, cool rise. The proportions are sound; the vagueness is all in the yeast and the oven.
- The flour measureThree and one-half quarts of sifted flour is about 14 cups, roughly 1.6-1.7 kg depending on how lightly it is scooped. Hold back the last two cups and add only what the dough needs after the initial mixing.
- Yeast, translatedA teacupful of yeast means homemade liquid barm, which few cooks keep now. A modern compressed cake is about 0.6 oz, though period cakes varied in size; the usual substitute for one is a packet, 2 1/4 teaspoons, of active dry or instant yeast.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons. For this much flour that is a light hand with salt by current taste, and 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons will give a better-flavored loaf.
- Warm waterWarm here means blood heat, under 110F. The potato should be mashed and cooled to the same before it meets the yeast, or the heat will kill it.
- The potatoOne large boiled potato, mashed smooth and lump-free, adds starch that keeps the crumb soft and the loaf fresh a day longer. Use a floury baking potato, not a waxy one, and do not salt or butter it.
- The overnight riseMixed at night with a full cake of yeast, the dough is meant to sit in a cool kitchen, not a heated one. In a modern 70F room it may well over-prove; give it a cool spot around 60F, or refrigerate it and let it come back to room temperature in the morning.
- KneadingFifteen minutes by hand is accurate for this quantity. In a stand mixer with a dough hook, 8 to 10 minutes on medium-low does the same work.
- Oven and doneness'Moderate' is conventionally rendered somewhere in the 350-375F range, though the original is a stove-side judgment rather than a number; bread of this size does better toward the hotter end. Bake 40 to 50 minutes, until the loaves sound hollow and register 200-205F inside. Pricking with a fork or skewer before baking is generally taken to let trapped gas out from under the crust.
- YieldThree standard 9x5 loaves, or four smaller ones. Cool completely on a rack before slicing or the crumb will gum.
Potato bread was a thrift measure before it was a preference: a boiled potato stretched expensive white flour, and its starch held water in the crumb so the loaf stayed soft through a week when baking day came once. The link between potatoes and bread ran deeper than that, since one common home yeast of the nineteenth century was a barm brewed from potato water, hops and sugar, kept alive from batch to batch on a kitchen shelf. The alternative offered here, a compressed yeast cake, was the newer convenience; reliable compressed yeast reached American grocers in the last quarter of the century and slowly retired the homemade jar. That this recipe lists both, barm first and the cake as a substitute, suggests only a broad window, since cookbooks offered barm-or-cake alternatives from the 1880s well into the 1910s, when a cook might reasonably have either in the house.