This Victorian Life by Sarah A. Chrisman

Author:Sarah A. Chrisman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

Even in the best of households, though, the bread sometimes failed. Yeast is a finicky organism. As Mrs. Beeton said, “Extremes of cold and heat kill it, and a temperature that it does not like prevents it from growing actively …”120 When a failure of fungal alchemy prevented the standard bread from rising—or if a busy schedule simply prevented the mistress of a house from setting her bread to rise in time for supper—there were a number of other options in the late Victorian kitchen. Baking-powder biscuits were a particularly popular choice of quick bread in the summer, since they didn’t necessarily require firing up an entire wood oven—they could be cooked on a much smaller oil stove. Graham gems (which are similar to biscuits but made with coarser graham flour) were thought to be so easy that even a man could manage them!121 Muffins, popovers, buns, and various sorts of breakfast cakes were all perennially popular. In America, there were so many different recipes for corn bread and its cousins sometimes a person gets the impression that hardly any two localities made this classic in precisely the same way. (Mrs. Beeton’s recipe for American bread is, in fact, a type of corn bread.)

And of course, if all else failed, there was always the local bakery to fall back on.

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