10/01/2007
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Nowhere was that more important than in the food they ate.
Sunday Andrea Ostrofsky, a member of Augusta's Old Fort Western living museum staff, and an expert on baking -- old and new -- demonstrated how early Americans were able to make their breads and cakes rise to help feed their families.
Visitor Dick Dearborn said he was fascinated to find out how such a vital component of pre-industrialized society was available to those living in such rustic surroundings on the very edge of 18th century civilization.
"I'm just interested in everything and I always wanted to know how foodstuffs were made back then," Dearborn said Sunday at a demonstration of rising dough at Old Fort Western, Augusta's living museum. "How did they make the dough and how did they get it to rise?"
For thousands of years bread has been a staple of life for mankind around the world. But for most bread and other baked goods, some way to make them rise to add size, texture and flavor was necessary.
But frontiersmen and, often more importantly, women could not count on a store to provide yeast or other ingredients to make their dough rise -- also known as "leavening agents" -- so they had to fend for themselves.
"There were three different kinds of leavening agents people might have used in bread and cake recipes in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, and they're the same kind of things used today," Ostrofsky said.
The key to all of them was the creation of gas bubbles which allow baked products to "rise," making the pastry or bread softer and giving a lighter texture.
Most of the methods used utilize the creation of carbon dioxide bubbles, similar to the "fizz" of an opened soda bottle. But other techniques allow a baker to whip up a solution of egg whites or "cream" butter into sugar that allows air bubbles to be trapped in the mixture through vigorous mixing -- sometimes for as long as an hour, Ostrofsky explained.
The first, and perhaps most important because it was vital to most bread recipes, was yeast.
Today yeast is sold in compacted and refrigerated cubes or dried in packets.
But when Fort Western was built in 1754, settlers had to keep most of their own supplies. Even after the fort became a regular trading post, Ostrofsky said, sales and other records from that time do not indicate that yeast was ever a commodity exchanged at the fort's store.
The best source of yeast for bakers at the time came from drums used to brew beer, a common activity on most farms and even within families, she said. "Brewer's yeast" was an important and common part of life.
Dressed in traditional garb of the time, Ostrofsky showed off a clear glass bottle topped by a cork stopper in which she had gathered a brown liquid from a nearby pub that brews its own beer.
The yeast is actually a living microorganism -- named Saccharomyces ceriviseae, which means sugar fungus of the beer -- that digests sugar and generates alcohol and the carbon dioxide, which makes the bubbles for baking, although no one knew why it worked or that yeast was alive until the work of Louis Pasteur's research in 1859 discovered it was made up of single-celled fungi.
"People sometimes talked about a yeast being active or lively, but it wasn't until Louis Pasteur proved it that they knew it was a living organism," Ostrofsky said.
Once the confection is baked in the oven, the yeast is killed. But Ostrofsky said early bakers sometimes kept a portion of a bread dough to keep the yeast alive for the next loaf, or kept it growing in a rich liquid mixture of hops and starch from sugar or potatoes in a bottle like hers.
Dearborn recalled a tradition in a Franco-American family that married into his family that included continuing to grow a portion of fruit cake with its complex yeasts that was used each year to bake new fruit cakes at holidays.
"It looked horrible, but it tasted wonderful," Dearborn said. "It was pretty much passed down probably for a hundred of years."
The story didn't surprise Ostrofsky. "I really like fungi," Ostrofsky says. "They're really dear to my heart."
Pictures from the ancient Egyptians show the use of yeast for both beer and bread, indicating its discovery stretches back near to the limits of recorded history.
But Ostrofsky said leavening or rising bubbles can also be created by other methods as well.
Chemical leaveners that included such things as "Pearlash" or potassium carbonate, an early industrial chemical made from the ashes of burned hardwoods, created a basic solution that when mixed with slightly acid foods like molasses or sour milk, buttermilk or cream of tartar, a byproduct of wine distillation, creates its own bubbles.
Chemical leaveners come down to us in the form of baking soda and baking powder, a pre-mixed form that weakens with time, she said. They sometimes are known by their historic name, saleratus, a notation that can sometimes be found in older recipes.
Finally, "mechanical leavening" comes from whipping air into mixtures of ingredients that holds those bubbles.
Recipes taking advantage of this method really took off, Ostrofsky said, after the invention of the hand-cranked mixing machine in 1870, one of the more popular known today as angel food cake.
Gary Remal -- 621-5642
gremal@centralmaine.com
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