Dear Kitchen Saints,
This morning I am making bread. I had bought this apple cider at the store on sale? Well, it's gone to hard cider? So it has some of its own natural yeast. This stuff gets my creative mind going. So for my liquid in the raisin bread I am using the cider. I just made up a loaf of bread, and it is rising. I imagine it will rise like crazy. That cider shudda been tied to a post with a strong cowboy rope. But that's beside the point.
Also, this morning I had fixed Jim some sausage and pancakes. I fried the sausage in a big cast iron skillet. The skillet was still warm so I put the bread dough in the skillet to rise, and I put a lid on it. The skillet has the leftover sausage grease and tiny bits of fried meat in it. So I rubbed the bread dough in that and let it rise. Now, the old time mothers did stuff like that. They made bread and soup or whatever from what they had on hand. They didn't have corn oil and just used bacon grease or lard for their baking if they didn't have butter.
My sugar bowl was about empty of sugar so I just put my yeast in there to rise and to use the scrapings of the sugar stuck in the bowl to make the yeast rise. Yeast loves sugar.
During the Depression a lot of folks started using the canned milk. I think the government gave it away to poor folks. And after they used the milk in the can, they used the rinsing of the can for something else. They would fill the empty can with water and use this light milk for baking biscuits or to make gravy.
I love having canned milk on hand. I use it in my coffee mostly. When the children were home, I would take a pound of butter and add it to a can of evaporated milk and beat it with my mixer and this made 2 pounds of butter out of one pound of butter. I had an old fashioned crock I kept it in, and kept it in the fridge.
And sometimes, if the Mother at home on the farm ran out of sugar for her desserts, she would use a lot of fruit in her cakes to make things sweet. Or if she had homemade canned jelly and preserves in the root cellar, she would use that to make a dessert. Jam cake was probably invented by a mother who needed a dessert for her family. She made a lightly sweet butter sheet cake then baked it. After it was done, she would spread the top with her home canned peach jam and then roll it up. Then she would slice it. I think they were called Jelly Rolls.
When the children were young and the peanut butter was all gone, I would take the jar with the scrapings in it and add warm milk and honey. Then I would put the lid back on the jar and shake it up and called it peanut butter milk. The kids loved it. And I would do this with leftover jam in a jar with warm milk and honey. You need the milk to be warm to melt the peanut butter or jelly or whatever. But the old time Mothers never wasted even the scrapings from a jar. And she saved the jar.
When the old time Mothers made butter, they would have the light watery milk left over which is called buttermilk. But it wasn't thick and rich and white like you buy in the store. It was watery. But mother saved this buttermilk for making biscuits and all sorts of breads and pancakes. Buttermilk will make biscuits rise slightly without using baking powder -- well, depending too on how ripe it is.
All of my stuff ferments anyway. The kids, when they are here and I show them how to make bread, say, "Mom's yeast rises like I have never seen before." So then they will want to take some of my yeast home to see if they can get it to rise like mine does. They will say, "Well, Mom does this or that with her yeast I will do that, too." But, actually, it's just the house here, I think. I bake a lot and I think a lot of natural yeast is in the air here. Because everything bubbles here.
I think a house where folks are telling jokes and are happy that the yeast loves it, too. Also a hot blooded Mama helps.
