Page:The English housekeeper, 6th.djvu/297

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"Supposing the quantity to be a bushel of flour, put it into the trough, and make a deep hole in the middle. Stir into a pint (or if very thick and good, ½ or ¾ pint), of yeast, a pint of soft warm water, and pour it into the hole in the flour. In very cold weather the water should be nearly hot, in very warm weather only lukewarm. Take a spoon and work it round the outside of this body of moisture, so as to bring into that body, by degrees, flour enough to form a thin batter, which you must stir about well for a minute or two. Then take a handful of flour and scatter it thinly over the head of this batter, so as to hide it. Cover a cloth over the trough to keep the air from the bread, and the thickness of this covering, as well as the situation of the trough as to distance from the fire, must depend on the nature of the place and state of the weather, as to heat and cold. When you perceive that the batter has risen enough to make cracks in the flour that you covered it over with, you begin to form the whole mass into dough, thus: you begin round the hole containing the batter, working the flour into the batter, and pouring in, as it is wanted, soft water, or half milk and half water, in winter a little warm, in summer quite cold; but before you begin this, you scatter the salt over the heap, at the rate of a lb. to a bushel of flour. When you have got the whole sufficiently moist, you knead it well. This is a grand part of the business; for unless the dough be well worked, there will be little round lumps of flour in the loaves; besides which, the original batter, which is to give fermentation to the whole, will not be duly mixed. The dough must, therefore, be well worked. The fists must go heartily into it. It must be rolled over; pressed out; folded up, and pressed out again, until it be completely mixed, and formed into a stiff and tough dough."

The loaves are made up according to fancy, both as to size and shape; but the time they require to bake will greatly depend upon the former, for the household loaf of a Hampshire farm-house takes three hours or three hours and a half, while that of a Norfolk farm-house does not, I should imagine, require half the time.