Tee-total barm
Lest you think that the symbolic gesture of the self-righteous reformer is an invention of our own age, let me assure you that it has been with us for a good couple of centuries. Tonight I bring you conscientious consumption, 1830s-style!
But first, as always, a little historical background.
Until about the turn of the twentieth century, yeast for baking bread came mainly from byproducts of brewing beer — either barm, the foam that forms on top of the wort while it’s brewing, or what some colonials called “emptins,” the yeast-rich stuff left at the bottom of the barrel. Brewers started each batch from the savings of the last, and they guarded their cultures carefully, because if a culture soured, to cultivate another properly from wild yeast might take generations of beers. But brewers had enough barm left over to sell for baking, and the best baking yeast — “brewer’s yeast,” in old cookbooks — came straight from the brewery.
Once a housewife had obtained good yeast, though, she too could culture it carefully, using a half-cup or so of her last batch of yeast to start a new batch that she fed with flour, bran, mashed potato, or even pumpkin. (If yeast can eat it, it’s been used to brew beer… and also to culture baking yeast.) The principle is the same as with sourdough, except that it’s the yeast that’s renewed rather than the dough itself. Most Americans leavened their bread that way because they came from brewing cultures, either English or German. In France, where wine has always been far more popular than beer, bread was traditionally leavened with sourdough, because wine yeast doesn’t leaven bread well.
An attentive and industrious housewife could keep a yeast culture going for years, but at the beginning of that chain was always brewer’s yeast. As the temperance movement gained steam in the early 19th century, that fact seems to have bothered some activists, who preferred to avoid supporting the brewing industry in any way. In 1838 The Farmer’s Magazine of London gave instructions for making yeast without recourse to a brewery, by cultivating wild yeast or — less chancy — starting with “tee total barm,” some other abstainer’s live culture.
It’s funny, though, that the recipes were otherwise identical to other contemporary instructions for making yeast. They called for hops, which probably helped to preserve the yeast from souring but also would have made it taste like beer. And, of course, any yeast culture produces alcohol: the yeast consume sugar and give off alcohol and carbon dioxide as by-products. In bread the carbon dioxide leavens the dough and the alcohol bakes out, but one way or another, alcohol is being produced. Not to mention that once a housewife had a yeast culture going, whatever its source, she wasn’t supporting brewers to keep the one she had.
“Tee total barm” doesn’t seem to have caught on; this is the only mention of it I’ve run across. I’m sure those English temperance reformers felt good about themselves while it lasted, though, even if they didn’t topple the brewing industry. Or even avoid producing alcohol.
(As a postscript, I’m working up some experiments with homemade yeast, so check back in a month or so for a lab report.)
Christine
6 Jan. 2012, 12:00 am
Was hoping you might include a couple of the more colorful rants you encountered in researching the need for tee-total barm. While the earnest reformer is nothing new, our generations cannot hold a candle to the grandiloquent harangues of what I like to think back on as the “Golden Age” of rhetoric in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Rachel
16 Jan. 2012, 12:46 am
Fascinating! Thank you. Once you get a little yeast built up, try it with the no knead bread recipe published by Mark Bittman of the NYT. You may find it interesting as well as fabulously delicious. 1/4 tsp is used during an 18 hour raising process.