When I made Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s French Rolls, I wrote a lot about the historical puzzles of flour and yeast.
Despite her wealthy background, Lea’s culinary style is fairly rural. Her book contains a lot of information on bread baking, calling bread “the most important article of food.” She included instructions for baking bread in a dutch-oven, brick oven, or a stove. The brick oven instructions are particularly detailed:
“If you have a large family, or board the laborers of a farm, it is necessary to have a brick oven so as to bake but twice a week… If you arrange every thing with judgment, half a dozen loaves of bread, as many pies or puddings, rusk, rolls or biscuit may be baked at the same time. [To rise bread overnight] the sponge should be made up at four o’clock in the afternoon.
You should have a large tin vessel with holes in the top, to keep bread in; in this way, it will be moist at the end of the week in cool weather.
Coarse brown flour or middlings makes very sweet light bread…
It is very important to have good oven-wood split fine, and the oven filled with it as soon as the baking is out [so it stays] ready and dry. Early in the morning, take out half the wood, and spread the remainder over the oven… light a few sticks in the fire… when it is burnt to coals, stir them about well with a long-handled shovel made for the purpose.
When it looks bright on the top and sides, it is hot enough; let the coals lay all over the bottom till near the time of putting in the bread…
Put in the bread first, and then the pies; if you have a plain rice pudding to bake, it should be put in the middle of the front, and have two or three shovels of coal put round it… pies made of green fruit will bake in three-quarters of an hour. Rusks, or rolls, take about half an hour.
When all is taken out, fill the oven with wood ready for the next baking.”
Bread was obviously a central part of her culinary routine. In addition to managing the baking, this would entail maintaining the live yeast cultures, and possibly included blending flours to suit her needs, from locally available types of wheat.
Elizabeth Ellicott Lea
For yeast, Lea preferred hop yeast, made by feeding yeast with a slurry of flour and water boiled with hops. Yeast could also be made with potatoes, corn flour or milk.
When I saw that some people from the Baltibrew group were doing a wild yeast capture, my interest was piqued. I followed the blog all summer as they went through the phases of attempting to isolate wild yeast strains, examining them, and ultimately brewing beer with them. Of the initial sixteen attempts, four captures were free enough of mold or airborne contaminants to experiment with. The strain I received came from a tree in Locust Point.
As I gathered my bread ingredients, I learned about a new source of local flour, Migrash Farm. They have a stand at the downtown farmers market with a nice selection of flours, all from the Chesapeake area. I selected two different flours to work with – an Appalachian white and a hard red wheat.
Riversdale Kitchen Guild baking breads at the Riversdale House
At the beginning of the summer, I’d actually started growing hops so that I could follow Lea’s instructions to the letter. Unfortunately, the rats found my hops delicious and I had to buy some regular-ole Cascade hops. So that is one component of this recipe that was not completely local.
That ended up not mattering very much because the hops method didn’t yield a useful product right away. I made some muffin dough which didn’t gain very much air at all. Who knows what I did wrong. Elizabeth Ellicott Lea would be so disappointed.
Instead, of took some of the yeast capture straight from the jar (which is very much alive and bubbling) and proofed it with some flour and sugar. When I saw that it was lively, I gave Lea’s muffin recipe a 2nd try. These turned out fine. Not “Thomas’s English Muffin” fluffy of course (for several reasons), but still a really nice sourdough taste. Toasting them brought out more of the flavor.
Advertisement in the Baltimore Sun, 1843
After a few more days of letting the hop yeast sit, I made some bread with it, following Lea’s very basic instructions – no eggs or fats included:
“If you wish to make a large loaf, it will take three pints of water,
more than half a tea-cup of yeast, and two spoonsful of salt; when the
rising is light, knead it up, have the dutch-oven greased; put it in,
and set it near the fire, but not so near that it will scald. When it
rises so as to crack on the top, set the oven on coals; have the lid
hot, cut the loaf slightly across the top, dividing it in four; stick it
with a fork and put the lid on, when it is on a few minutes, see that it
does not bake too fast, it should have but little heat at the bottom,
and the coals on the top should be renewed frequently, turn the oven
round occasionally.”
The resulting loaf did get some air in it – with much coaxing from heat.
My house is pretty cold in winter, even when I’m baking. Lea would have probably had an overwhelmingly warm place by the fire where this yeast could really do some leavening. I have a lot of experience with rising dough in the refrigerator (or my cold house). That simply didn’t work with this yeast.
I’ll probably keep experimenting with the yeast this winter. I expect it may become contaminated with other wild yeasts in my kitchen (including the commercial strain I’ve used in the past.)
This type of fanatic pursuit doesn’t remotely imply that I am tasting a loaf of bread straight from Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s brick oven. What it does accomplish is helping me to get a better understanding of the conditions she worked with, and a respect for her mastery of them.
Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s Hop Yeast:
“It is important to those that make their own bread, to make their own
yeast, or they cannot judge of its strength. The best is the
old-fashioned hop yeast, which will keep for six weeks in winter.Put a pint of hops in a pot, with a quart of water; cover it tightly,
and let it boil slowly for half an hour; strain it while boiling hot on
a pint of flour, and a heaped table-spoonful of salt; stir it well, and
let it stand till nearly cool; when put in a tea-cupful of good yeast;
if it is not sweet, put in a little salaeratus, just as you stir it in;
keep it in a warm place till it rises, when put it in a stone jug, and
cork it tightly. Keep it in a cool place in summer, but do not let it
freeze in winter; shake it before you use any.When your yeast jug is empty, fill it with water, and let it soak; wash
it well, and if it should smell sour, rinse it with salaeratus water. If
you have a garden, raise your own hops by all means; pick them by the
first of September, or they will lose their strength; dry them on sheets
spread on the garret floor.If you buy hops, choose light green ones, with the yellow dust about
them. Brown hops have generally stayed too long on the vines.“
Muffins:
“Warm a pint of milk, and stir into it a pound and a quarter of flour, (a
quart of flour is about equal to a pound and a quarter,) and two eggs,
the yelks beaten with the batter, the whites alone, mix with these two
spoonsful of lively yeast and a little salt, let them rise, and when you
are nearly ready to bake them, stir in a large spoonful of melted
butter, butter the rings and bake on a griddle, or in the dripping-pan
of a stove. Split and butter before sending them to table.“
Dutch Oven Loaf (Instructions in body of post)
Recipes from Domestic Cookery by Elizabeth Ellicott Lea
