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Wheat and Maize Bread

A bread made from wheat flour, cornmeal, salt, yeast, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Wheat and Maize Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix Indian meal with wheaten flour.

  2. Add coarse sea salt.

  3. Combine fresh yeast with boiling water in a bowl.

  4. Make a hollow in the flour.

  5. Pour in the yeast mixture.

  6. Stir to form a thin batter.

  7. Sprinkle flour on the batter.

  8. Cover the bowl.

  9. Let it sit for 1 hour.

  10. Stir in 2 more quarts of boiling water.

  11. Cover again.

  12. Let it stand in a warm place for 10 hours.

Shape and rise

  1. Knead the dough thoroughly.

  2. Gash the surface with a knife.

  3. Let it rise for 2 more hours until very light.

  4. Form the dough into loaves.

  5. Place the loaves in tins.

  6. Let the loaves rise for 30 more minutes.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a good oven.

  2. If the crust is hard, wrap the loaves in a towel after baking.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Indian meal
Forms the main body of the loaf, giving the bread its corn flavour and crumb.
Wheaten flour
Provides gluten structure so the dough can trap gas and hold its shape.
Fresh yeast
Produces gas through fermentation, causing the dough to rise and become light.
Boiling water
Hydrates the flours and gelatinises the cornmeal, giving a moist, tender crumb.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until very light. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce enough gas for a light crumb. Stopping early leaves dense bread, while the long rise lets gluten and starch set around the trapped gas.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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