By depending upon ready-baked bread we have come to consider it a difficult process to make good yeast bread and almost a hardship to try to have home-made bread.
I had fallen into the habit of buying my bread; my family was so small that it hardly seemed necessary to insist that bread should be made in my kitchen when good bread could be bought at a reasonable price. The result was that when the call came to conserve the wheat, I resorted almost entirely to quick breads made with baking powder or with sour milk and soda. However, the experiments that I made with these materials proved so interesting and satisfactory that I decided to see what I could do with a yeast cake and other grains than wheat.
My first experiments were failures and I was discouraged because, instead of saving food, I was wasting it, and yet I was unwilling to acknowledge myself defeated by the little square of leaven that came to me so attractively done up in tinfoil.
After careful consideration I decided that I had rushed into undue intimacy with a force of which I had very little understanding and that I might do better if I cultivated the acquaintance by degrees.
My next experiments were made with a very simple sponge of whole wheat flour, water, and yeast, which I allowed to rise for about four hours. I divided it into four parts, and to one I added scalded corn meal and rye flour; to the second, raw corn meal and whole wheat flour; to the third, barley flour and rye; and to the fourth, rice flour. I put salt in each lot, but no sugar or shortening. As I worked I kept a paper and pencil beside me and made careful notes of everything I did, also of results that I expected and of any doubts that occurred to me as to the wisdom of what I was doing. The four little loaves that resulted taught me many things and were the beginning of experiments that lasted through the summer—experiments that any housekeeper could make, for I had no laboratory, only the kitchen of my country house and the utensils found in every house.
In giving the results of my summer’s work I have tried to make the recipes so simple and yet explicit that the most inexperienced cook can follow them.
Amy Littlefield Handy
Barnstable, Massachusetts