Wheat Bread
One pint of mashed or grated potato, one pint of flour, two tablespoonfuls hop yeast; add sufficient warm water to make a stiff batter. Set late at night. If the proper temperature is kept, it will be light early in the morning. Then make a hole in the center of a pan of flour, stir in half a pint of boiling water, add half a pint of cold, then add the sponge, with a little salt. Mix soft. When light, mould into loaves. Let rise again and bake.
This is a two-stage potato sponge bread from the era before packaged yeast, and it assumes the cook already knows what a risen sponge looks like. The quantities for the second stage are deliberately vague — the pan of flour is however much the sponge will carry.
- The hinge: temperature overnight"If the proper temperature is kept" means roughly 75–80F for eight or nine hours. Too cold and the sponge is still slack at dawn; too warm and it over-ferments and turns sour and thin. A turned-off oven with the light on, or the top of a refrigerator, gets you close.
- Hop yeastA homemade liquid barm brewed from hops, flour and potato, kept going from batch to batch. Its strength varied a great deal from jar to jar, so no exact modern equivalent can be given; a small quantity of instant yeast will raise the sponge, but a sourdough-style liquid starter behaves far more like the original.
- A pint is 2 cupsA pint of mashed potato is about 1 lb of cooked potato; a pint of flour is 8–9 oz depending on how it is scooped. The recipe is written by volume throughout, so weigh nothing and stay consistent.
- The boiling and cold waterHalf a pint of boiling water stirred into the flour scalds part of it, gelatinizing the starch and giving a softer crumb and better keeping quality. The half pint of cold water that follows cools the mixture, but equal parts boiling and cold will still be well above blood heat, so let it fall to lukewarm before the sponge goes in — do not add the sponge to hot flour paste or you kill the yeast.
- "Mix soft" and the saltAim for a slack, tacky dough rather than a firm one; the potato holds a great deal of water. About 2 teaspoons of salt suits this quantity; unsalted bread tastes flat and ferments faster.
- The two risesExpect 1 to 1½ hours for the bulk rise and 45 minutes to an hour in the pans, depending on how vigorous the starter is. Potato doughs rise quickly; go by doubled volume, not the clock.
- BakingThe original gives no temperature because it was written for a range judged by hand. Bake at 400F for 35–45 minutes for two standard loaves, until the internal temperature reaches 200–205F.
- YieldThe second-stage flour is unmeasured, so yield varies with how much the sponge takes up: roughly two 9x5-inch loaves, or three smaller ones.
Potato bread of this kind was common in nineteenth-century American and British domestic baking, and it survived into books like this one because it solved two problems at once: potato starch feeds the yeast, which mattered when the yeast was a homemade hop barm of unpredictable strength, and the extra moisture keeps the bread soft for several days in a house with no wrapping but a cloth. Hop yeast — hops boiled with flour and potato, then kept alive by regular feeding — was maintained much the way one keeps a sourdough today, and hops carry antibacterial compounds that are generally credited with holding off spoilage in the jar. The instruction to "set late at night" belongs to a kitchen where the stove was banked rather than switched off, so the room held a steady warmth until morning; compressed cake yeast, sold commercially from about 1870, is what eventually made overnight sponges optional rather than obligatory.