Bread is, not surprisingly, the second thing covered in lessons at the Boston Cooking School. If fact, it will be covered more than once. This recipe is pretty standard for the bread baking process, but it’s significantly cheaper than later recipes since it uses only the most basic ingredients of flour, water & yeast.
When making this, I first halved the recipe. We aren’t huge bread eaters and frankly, I am always a little hesitant to use a full 4 cups of flour on something that might not turn out well. But fate had other ideas. Baking this bread was my first attempt at making video tutorials of recipes and I messed it up. I messed it up a lot. Oh the bread turned out fine, don’t worry about that. It was the royal cluster of making video content that caused all the havoc. As a result, I ended up making (& successfully recording) a second batch. Good thing too, since this bread shows up again in two later recipes in lesson one! Gotta love that use what you have mentality.
The original recipe calls for using either liquid or “cake compressed” yeast. Both can still be purchased today but can be difficult to find in your average grocery store. OK, let’s be honest, even regular packages of dry yeast have been hard to find this year. Luckily, my boyfriend is a pantry staples hoarder and part of our stockpile includes a 2lb bag of bread yeast, along with a variety of brewing yeast. A little math was all I needed to transform my dry yeast into Mary’s liquid yeast. Don’t worry, I’ve included the math here for you.
While mixing I did discover one thing that makes me wonder about the moisture retention in our modern flours vs the “healthful flour” advocated in the 1880s. In adding water to the mixture, the full pint suggested was too much. While Mary does say that “if it [the dough] be too soft, add some of the reserved cup of flour” (63), that cup wasn’t nearly enough to bring my mixture back to anything resembling a kneadable dough. For the second batch I added the pint slower, and stopped when the dough began to form. I ended up using only about ½ the suggested amount.
I also veered from Mary’s instructions to put ½ of the dough into each bread pan. This might have made for bigger loaves and probably results in more rise over the edge of the pan when baking. I really wanted multiple loaves, since I knew I’d be using this bread for other recipes later in this lesson. This is one of the few changes I will make when doing this recipe again.
With batch one I was anxious to get baking, so they only rose a few hours before being formed and even less before baking. Batch two was made later in the day and as a result was allowed to rise overnight before being shaped into pans, then rose another couple of hours. This second batch ended up with a larger crumb than the first with more noticeable air holes and of the 4 loaves, those are the two we ate first out of preference. It also helps that since I was at work by the time they needed to be baked, it was my boyfriend who was in charge of their final cooking. His definition of “golden brown” is obviously lighter than mine and these later loaves ended up with not just a lighter color, but a lighter crust that we also preferred. Not that I’m prone to burning things, I just err on the side of “5 more minutes” more, more often than is probably advisable.
All in all, this is a good basic, hard to fail bread recipe that didn’t require anything special. Wrapping the finished loaves in “several thicknesses of bread cloth…a yard and a half square of coarse table linen” (61) did seem to give them the “soft, wafer-like” (61) crust. The loaves stayed nicely soft, without becoming dry & crumbly like many homemade breads I’ve tried. We liked this recipe enough that I plan to make it again, maybe with something more than generic all-purpose flour and putting the full quantity of dough in each pan, since now I’m confident that it will be eaten before going stale.
Until then, I’ll see you in the past.
Water Bread
A good, basic bread recipe for using in other recipes or just eating plain.
Ingredients
- 8 Cups Flour, Sifted
- 1 Tsp. salt
- 1 Tbl. Sugar
- 1 Tbl. Butter, Drippings or Lard
- 1/2 Cup liquid yeast or 3 Tbl. Dry Yeast Mixed into 1/4 Cup Water
- 1 Pint Lukewarm Water
Directions
- Step 1 If using modern dry yeast, combine with water & allow to sit & “bloom”.
- Step 2 Sift flour, reserving about 1 Cup.
- Step 3 Combine salt & sugar with the flour.
- Step 4 Cut in the butter or other fat until the mixture looks like coarse meal.
- Step 5 Pour the yeast into the middle of the flour mixture.
- Step 6 Mix well with a bread knife or a strong spoon. Make sure no dry pockets of flour remain.
- Step 7 If this dough is too soft to handle, add some of the reserved flour.
- Step 8 Kneed in the bowl or on a floured board, for 30 minutes until smooth.
- Step 9 Cover & let rest until double in size.
- Step 10 Punch down & let rise until double a second time.
- Step 11 Divide into 4 parts & shape into loaves, putting 2 loaves in one pan together.
- Step 12 Cover & let rise again until the edge is near the top of the pan.
- Step 13 Bake in a hot oven (425*) for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until golden brown & the bottom sounds hollow.
- Step 14 Remove from pans & cool on a rack.
- Step 15 Leave uncovered for a harder crust, wrap in coarse cloth until cool for a softer crust.
- Step 16 Store in a clean stoneware or tin bread bin.
Works Cited
Advertisement for Coombs’ flour, 1897, National Archives.
Lincoln, Mary J. Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking. Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1884.
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