Bann or yeast sufficient for 800 loaves, 1 lb. each, is made of brown sugar, 2 lbs.; potatoes, If lbs.; hops, oz., with half a gallon of water. Boil and mash the potatoes; boil the hops until none appear on the surface of the water ; strain and dissolve the sugar in the liquor. The potatoes are then added, and the whole is strained into a jar or small tub. The quantity produces about 3i pints, and is generally ready for use in twelve hours. The addition of a small portion of the old barin hastens fermentation.
'Wheaten bread is largely used in Northern India and by the Chinese. In Ho-nan, Shensi, Shansi, and Shantung, wheaten bread and pastry are staple articles of diet. Chinese bread is free from alum. It is raised by means of leaven, pearl-ash ; and the small loaves or cakes are steamed in a very ingenious and simple way.
Cakes of wheat-flour, prepared on the girdle, are a common article of diet amongst the well-to-do races of Northern and Central Inclia. Further south, on the table-lands of the Peninsula, the natives of India use unleavened cakes made of the flour of the Indian corn, the zea mays, rather less nutritious than that made from wheat, but more fattening, in consequence of the greater quantity of oil con tained iu it. Also, amongst the millets, bread is made of the great millet, Sorghum vulgare ; the spiked millet, Penicilloria spicata ; and the very poor of the people use the hard raggy, Eleusine coracana, in the form of cakes or porridge. Barley is occasionally used to the westward. Along the seaboard of all Southern Asia, and eastward into China, however, boiled rice is the great article of diet, and it is often cooked, with unfermented palm-wine, into the cakes familiarly known in India as ' hoppers,' the apa ' of the people.
Rice flour is scarcely ever made into fermented bread, although it is said to be occasionally mixed with wheat flour for that purpose. The superiority of wheat to all other farinaceous plants, in the manufacture of bread, is very great. Its essential constituents are starch, also called farina or fecula, gluten, and a little sugar and albumen. It is occasionally adulterated with alum, which is added to whiten the flour, and to enable it to retain a larger quantity of water. Salt is also employed in the adulteration of wheaten bread, to whiten the flour and enable it to hold more water ; and carbonate of magnesia is improperly used to obtain the same result.
In Eastern and Southern Asia, the well-known sago is made from the starch granules contained in the pith of several species of palms. It is largely used as an article of diet, alike for the robust labourer as for the invalid, and is extensively ex ported for the use of the sick and the nursery. Amongst the Arabs, burgoul is wheat boiled with leaven, and then dried in the sun. The dried wheat is preserved for a year, and boiled with butter and oil. Leavened bread is called khabz. —Robinson's Travels, ii. 132 ; Tomlinson; Hassall, Simmonds, p. 217; Boyle; Bombay Times; Stewart; Smith ; Powell ; M`Culloch. See Cereal Grains.