I have read “bread baking” is done once every three or four weeks, no oftener, in some of the farm houses of Central Europe, and yet stale bread is there unknown.  Their method of keeping bread fresh is to sprinkle flour into a large sack and into this pack the loaves, taking care to have the top crusts of bread touch each other.  If they have to lie bottom to bottom, sprinkle flour between them.  Swing the sack in a dry place.  It must swing and there must be plenty of flour between the loaves.  It sounds more odd than reasonable, I confess.

“BUCKS COUNTY” HEARTH-BAKED RYE BREAD (AS MADE BY AUNT SARAH)

1 quart sweet milk (scalded and cooled). 1 tablespoonful lard or butter. 2 table spoonsful sugar. 1/2 tablespoonful salt. 1 cup wheat flour. 3 quarts rye flour (this includes the one cup of wheat flour). 1 Fleischman yeast cake or 1 cup of potato yeast.

[Illustration:  “BUCKS COUNTY” RYE BREAD]

Pour 1 quart of luke-warm milk in a bowl holding 7 quarts.  Add butter, sugar and salt, 1-1/2 quarts rye flour and 1 cup of yeast, or one Fleischman’s yeast cake, dissolved in a little lukewarm water.  Beat thoroughly, cover with cloth, and set in a warm place to rise about three hours, or until it almost reaches the top of bowl.  When light, stir in the remaining 1-1/2 quarts of rye flour, in which one cup of wheat is included; turn out on a well-floured bake board and knead about twenty minutes.  Shape dough into one high, round loaf, sprinkle flour liberally over top and sides of loaf, and place carefully into the clean bowl on top of a well-floured cloth.  Cover and set to rise about one hour, when it should be light and risen to top of bowl.  Turn the bowl containing the loaf carefully upside down on the centre of a hot sheet iron taken from the hot oven and placed on top of range.  A tablespoonful of flour should have been sifted over the sheet iron before turning the loaf out on it.  Remove cloth from dough carefully after it has been turned from bowl and place the sheet iron containing loaf immediately in the hot oven, as it will then rise at once and not spread.  Bake at least sixty minutes.  Bread is seldom baked long enough to be wholesome, especially graham and rye bread.  When baked and still hot, brush the top of loaf with butter and wash the bottom of loaf well with a cloth wrung out of cold water, to soften the lower, hard-baked crust.  Wrap in a damp cloth and stand aside to cool where the air will circulate around it.  Always set rye bread to rise early in the morning of the same day it is to be baked, as rye sponge sours more quickly than wheat sponge.  The bread baked from this recipe has the taste of bread which, in olden times, was baked in the brick ovens of our grandmother’s day, and that bread was unexcelled.  I know of what I am speaking, having watched my grandmother bake bread in an old-fashioned brick oven, and have eaten hearth-baked rye bread, baked directly on the bottom of the oven, and know, if this recipe be closely followed, the young housewife will have sweet, wholesome bread.  Some Germans use Kumel or Caraway seed in rye bread.