Old Time Bread
"Gervase Markham, The English Hous-wife, 1649"
photo by Lavender Lynn
- Ready In:
- 6hrs 45mins
- Ingredients:
- 4
- Yields:
-
20 loaves
ingredients
- 1 bushel white flour
- 3 pints beer
- 1⁄4 cup salt, plus
- 1 gallon milk, plus
directions
- Your best and principal bread is Manchet, which you shall bake in this manner.
- First your meal being ground upon the black stones, if be possible, which makes the whitest flower, and boulted through the finest boulting cloth, you shall put it into a clean Kimnel.
- Opening the flower hollow in the midst, put into it of the best ale-barm, the quantity of three pints to a bushell of meale and some salt to season it with.
- Then put in your liquor reasonable warme, and kneade it very well together, with both your hands, and through the brake, or for want thereof, fould it in a cloth, and with your feete treade it a good space together.
- Then letting it lie an houre or thereabouts to swel.
- Take it foorth and mould it into Manchets, round, and flat, scorcht them about the wast to give it leave to rise, and prick it with your knife in the top, and so put into the oven, and bake with gentle heat.
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Reviews
-
This was so fun to try. My DH says 5 stars for entertainment value and 4 stars as a recipe. As it is written it did not work. We found beer with live yeast in it but it didn't work. DH thinks this is for 2 reasons. Even though it says it has live yeast in it DH thinks it was still pastueurized and therefore the yeast was dead. Also modern milk doesn't have the amt of milk fat present like they did then. So we tried it a 2nd time with 1 tsp yeast and 1 T butter added. It worked this way, A great rustic bread recipe. Dh is going to try 1 more time with a local microbrew with live yeast in it, if he can find it. Thank you for a very interesting and fun recipe. Made for FAll PAC 07. -
I love the part where you knead it with your feet. LOL
RECIPE SUBMITTED BY
I'm a retired old codger living on the Alabama coast and loving it. I'm also a frustrated chef who believes that too many family recipes have been lost because no one wrote them down. I figured this out when my children came home and asked for the everyday dishes we had always ate. They had no idea how to prepare them. I TAKE THAT BACK, ONE OF MY DAUGHTERS IS A BETTER COOK THAN I. So in 1986 I wrote a cookook of family recipes. They got it for Christmas 1989. Last year I decided to write a cookbook dedicated to the simple everyday meals we
all have everyday. I just finished it and it goes to the publisher next month. So now I can go back to my favorite pastimes, family, friends, cooking,fishing and hugging my beautiful wife Patricia. I've been retired several years now and my greatest pleasure is to sit down at a table, piled high with good food and surrounded by family and friends. Some of my best dishes are the easy ones. Beef and Noodles, PoMans Fried Potatoes, Vinager Gravy, Tomato Gravy. OH OH! my food is telling on me. Yup I'm a farm boy raised in northern Michigan on a rock farm and learned to cook from my German mother who could out cook anyone in the area.
