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Yeast Cakes, or Preserved Yeast

A dough made from flour, mashed potatoes, hop water, salt, sugar, yeast, and Indian meal, left to rise and then used as yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Yeast Cakes, or Preserved Yeast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil the hops in 2 quarts of boiling water.

  2. Cook the potatoes until tender, then mash them.

  3. Add the mashed potatoes to 2 pounds of flour.

  4. Pour the boiling hop water over the flour through a sieve and beat until smooth.

  5. While warm, stir in 2 tablespoons of coarse sea salt and ½ teacup of sugar.

  6. Before it cools, mix in 1 pint of good yeast.

  7. Once the yeast is light, add enough Indian meal to form a dough.

Dry and store the cakes

  1. Roll out the dough into cakes and place them on a cloth in a dry place, turning them daily.

  2. After a week or ten days, store the cakes in a bag in a dry place.

  3. To use, soak one cake in warm milk, mash it smooth, and use as yeast.

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

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Hops + potatotop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hops
Boiled in water to flavour the liquid and add bitterness that helps preserve the yeast.
Potatoes
Mashed into the dough, adding starch and moisture that keep the cakes soft and feed the yeast.
Flour
Forms the bulk of the dough and gives the cakes their structure.
Yeast
Leavens the dough through fermentation, causing it to rise and become light.
Sugar
Provides food for the yeast, speeding fermentation and adding a little sweetness.

The step that matters

Mixing in the yeast before the dough cools. Yeast works best in warm dough. If the mixture cools too much, fermentation slows and the dough may not rise properly, so the yeast should go in while the mixture is still warm.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (hops, flour, sugar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against hops, flour, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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