Classic Culinary Arts:

Yeast Recipe

Put two quarts of water and two table-spoonfuls of hops on to boil. Pare and grate six large potatoes. When the hops and water boil, strain the water on the grated potatoes, and stir well. Place on the stove and boil up once. Add half a cupful of sugar and one-fourth of a cupful of salt. Let the mixture get blood warm; then add one cupful of yeast, or one cake of compressed yeast, and let it rise in a warm place five or six hours. When well risen, turn into a stone jug. Cork this tightly, and set in a cool place. As poor yeast is the chief cause of poor bread, pains should be taken to make yeast properly and to keep it well. It must never be allowed to stand in a warm room after it has risen, and the jug in which it is kept should be carefully washed and scalded each time the yeast is renewed. As much care must be taken with the stopper as with the jug. When it is convenient to get fresh cakes of Fleischmann's compressed yeast, it will be much better and cheaper to use them than to make your own. This yeast is wholly free of any injurious substance, and with it good bread can always be made, provided the flour is good and the rules are followed.

Yeast Bread Recipe.

With these materials two loaves can be made: Two quarts of flour, half a cupful of yeast, nearly a pint and a half of water, half a table- spoonful each of lard, sugar, and salt. Sift the flour into a bread- pan, and, after taking out a cupful for use in kneading, add the salt, sugar, yeast, and the water, which must be about blood warm (or, say one hundred degrees, if in cold weather, and about eighty in the hot season). Beat well with a strong spoon. When well mixed, sprinkle a little flour on the board, turn out the dough on this, and knead from twenty to thirty minutes. Put back in the pan. Hold the lard in the hand long enough to have it very soft. Rub it over the dough. Cover closely, that neither dust nor air can get in, and set in a warm place. It will rise in eight or nine hours. In the morning shape into loaves or rolls. If into loaves, let these rise an hour where the temperature is between ninety and one hundred degrees; if into rolls, let these rise an hour and a half. Bake in an oven that will brown a teaspoonful of flour in five minutes. (The flour used for this test should be put on a bit of crockery, as it will have a more even heat.) The loaves will need from forty-five to sixty minutes to bake, but the rolls will be done in half an hour if placed close together in the pan; and if French rolls are made, they will bake in fifteen minutes. As soon as baked, the bread should be taken out of the pans and placed on a table where it can rest against something until cool. It should then be put in a stone pot or tin box, which has been thoroughly washed, scalded and dried, and be set away in a cool, dry place.

Yeast Bread Recipe, Number 2.

One cupful of Indian meal, two quarts of flour, one pint and a half of boiling water, one table-spoonful of sugar, one teaspoonful of salt, half a cake of compressed yeast. Four the boiling water on the Indian meal. Stir well, and set away to cool. When blood warm, add the yeast, salt and sugar to it. Stir this mixture into the flour, and proceed as for yeast bread, Number I.