Yeast Bread

Sift the flour into a large bread pan or bowl; make a hole in the middle of it and pour in the yeast in the ratio of a half a teacupful of yeast to two quarts of flour; stir the yeast lightly; then pour in your "wetting," either milk or water, as you choose. If you use water, dissolve in it a bit of butter the size of an egg; if you use milk, no butter is necessary, but the milk must be scalded and cooled before it is added. Stir the "wetting" very lightly, but do not mix all the flour into it; then cover the pan with a thick blanket or towel and set it in a warm place to rise (this is called "putting the bread in sponge"). When the sponge is light, add a teaspoonful of salt and mix all the flour in the pan with the sponge, kneading it well; then let it stand two hours or more until it has risen quite light. Knead it again until the dough is elastic, then form into loaves, place in baking tins, and allow to rise until the bulk is doubled. Bake in a quick oven from forty-five to sixty minutes (the temperature is right when a tablespoonful of flour browns in five minutes).

Mid- nineteenth-century scientists were sharply divided over the comparative nutritional value of yeast bread and bread raised with saleratus--potassium bicarbonate or sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). Proponents of yeast bread, while admitting that stale yeast or overfermentation produced a sour, unpalatable product, contended that "saleratus and soda in our bread have more to do with the thin bones, rotten teeth and flabby looks of our children--large and small--than many would imagine." Supporters of the opposite position, on the other hand, argued that "a large proportion of the bread in some communities, is scarcely more than an active form of yeast, thrown into the stomach only to produce fermentation and a host of disorders. And then we witness, of course, the blue vapors, which under different aspects, are as ruinous to the welfare and peace of a family as are those of a distillery." In all seriousness this group recommended making bread with weak muriatic (hydrochloric) acid and baking soda.