Name: Yeast. Mrs. E. S. Cheesebrough.
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons hops; 3 quarts water; 1 quart hot mashed potatoes; 1 cup flour; 1 tablespoon sugar; 1 tablespoon salt; 1 pint fresh baker's yeast or 2 cakes of yeast

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. Mrs. E. S. Cheesebrough.

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hop liquid

Boil hops in water for a few minutes.
In a bowl, combine hot mashed potatoes, flour, sugar, and salt.
Pour the boiling hop water over the mixture and strain through a colander.

Ferment and store

Add yeast while the mixture is warm.
Set the mixture in a warm place to rise.
Store the yeast in a cool place.

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.

Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,355 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Potato + sugartop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,032 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Hops + flourtop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10 recipes

Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).
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: Adds bitterness and aroma, and helps preserve the starter.
Mashed potatoes: Provide starch and moisture that feed the yeast.
Flour: Adds starch that the yeast can work on, giving the mixture body.
Sugar: Gives the yeast an easily used food source to drive fermentation.
Yeast: Ferments the mixture, producing gas that makes it rise.

The step that matters

Add yeast while the mixture is warm. Yeast works best at moderate warmth. If the mixture is too hot it can kill the yeast, and if it is too cold fermentation slows, so the rise is weak.

Swap the potato

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

Mustardfits better
Arrowrootfits better
Parsnipfits better
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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Yeast. Mrs. E. S. Cheesebrough.