exactly right. For this purpose they have oven wood kept in a pile by itself, and the sticks of nearly equal size. They then find out by trial, how many sticks heat the oven just right. Afterwards, they always use this number, and thus they are saved from much watching, and from many mistakes in baking.
Great care is needful also to put the bread in at just the right time. If the bread does not stand to rise long enough, it is too solid, either for health, or pleasure in eating. If it stands too long, it loses much of its sweetness, even if it does not become sour. A great deal of light and nice looking bread is not good, because it has lost its sweetness by being raised too much. The exactly right notch can only be found by trying, and after a while a cook will learn to know by the looks of the dough when it is just right.
Always smell of the dough, and if there is the least sourness, knead some dissolved pearlash in, and it will remove it. Nothing is worse than sour bread, and it can always be remedied by pearlash. To discover sourness, open a
place suddenly, and smell quickly before the gas escapes.
The following is the mode of making yeast and bread, practised by the domestic I have lived with, who makes as good bread as I ever saw.
For yeast, take a handful of hops, boil them in two quarts of water twenty minutes, strain off and mix in about three pints of flour, together with half a pint of distillery yeast, or a pint and a half of homemade yeast. Some molasses or sugar added, hides the bitter taste of the yeast, that sometimes is perceived in bread.
For bread, take a peck of flour, sift it, make a hole in the centre, and put in half a pint of distillery yeast, or nearly a pint of homemade yeast. Then wet up the flour with warm milk. The bread must then be kneaded for half an hour, until it is so thick and well mixed as to cleave from the hands without sticking at all. Raise it till it has cracks on the top and looks light and feathery. If sour at all, knead in a great spoonful of pearlash dissolved in a teacupful of milk. When the bread is baked, set the loaves on their ends, so that the bottom
may not steam, and cover it with a cloth. Some persons dampen the cloth to make the crust soft. Some persons put salt in bread, others do not. When bread is not wet with milk it needs salt, and a bit of butter is also an improvement.
In cooking vegetables, much depends upon boiling them the right length of time. This is especially the case with potatoes, which next after bread are the most important item in family cooking. Success in boiling potatoes well, depends almost entirely on taking them out of the water just as soon as they are done so as to be soft. If they remain after this point, they become water soaked. Therefore select the potatoes all nearly of one size, and try them often with a fork. As soon as it runs in easily, pour off the water, and hang them where they will be kept hot, keeping the cover off, to let off the steam. Even when potatoes are cooked in steam, they become water soaked, if they are kept steaming after they are cooked.
A very nice way to cook potatoes for a morning dish, is to pare them raw, and cut them in thin slices into a small quantity of