Hannah Wooley's 17th Century Bisket Bread Begins

I am returning this evening to historical bread and recipes; one of the seventeenth-century set of instructions that I mentioned last week intrigued me, so I decided to try it out in a modern kitchen.

 

The bisket bread in question comes from The Accomplisht Ladys Delight in Preserving, Physick and Cookery from 1675, which is attributed to Hannah Wooley.  The contents of the book were probably written by her but this work along with at least two others were published without her permission and she did not receive any profit from them.  This was very important to Hannah as, according to one of my old professors Dr. John Considine[i], she was one of the first women to make a living from her writing.  She was not, like the vast majority of female and many of the male writers of her time, an independently wealthy individual who took up the pen as a hobby or to provide instruction.  Her writing is addressed to women like herself who, “impoverished by the late Calamities, viz the Late Wars, Plague, and Fire,” were forced to creatively make a living.

By the time The Accomplisht Ladys Delight was published, Wooley was at least semi-famous in London, having made her name with the 1670 recipe collection The Queen-Like Closet.  This, her first work, played of the 1655 publication The Queen’s Closet Opened, which purported to be the recipes of Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s exiled widow.  There is a clear class distinction when comparing the books and Wooley is trying to make what was the domain of the upper class open to the “middling sort” as they were then known.

But that is enough about Hannah, let us consider her bread in the Ladys Delight.  As mentioned in the earlier entry, this is the only bread recipe in the book and it is for a specialty, long-lasting, variety called bisket bread.

To recap, her recipe reads:

Take half a peek [a peck, or 2 gallons] of Flour fine, two Ounces of Anniseeds, two Ounces of Coriander-seed, the whites of six Eggs, a pint of Ale-Yeast, with as much warm-water, as will make it up into a Paste, so bake it in a long Role; when it is two days Old, pare it [take the crust off,] and slice it, then Sugar it, and dry it in an Oven, and so keep it all the Year.

A gallon of flour would make a very large roll, so I began my adjustments by reducing the quantities to one third of their original.

This results in:

                5 1/3 cups of all-purpose flour

                15 grams of fennel seed (aniseed) whole

                15 grams of coriander seed whole

                2 egg whites

The yeast was trickier especially since I am no baker.  I had no idea what Ale-Yeast would translate into in terms of what I had available.  So I look at modern bread recipes to see what amount of yeast is used with about 5 cups of flour.  Generally the answer is:

               

                An 8 gram packet (2 ¼ tsps) of dry active yeast

I dissolved this in a cup of warm water and then added

               

                1 ½ cups more warm water

Stirring and then kneading, all these ingredients came together to make the slightly pasty dough seen below.  

Shaping the dough into a long roll, I divided it in two and baked it in an oven set to 375 °F until the crust started to colour and was hard.  Below is the result. 

So now I am to let them sit for two days at which time I will report back.

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[i] “Wolley [other married name Challiner], Hannah (b. 1622?, d. in or after 1674,)” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Online Edition.