Bread may be made from the meal of potatoes alone, with the addition of salt or yeast ; but it is heavy, brown, and apt to crumble into powder. To render it more ad hesive, AI. Parmenticr mixed with the meal a decoction of bran, or a mixture of honey and water, either of which made it lighter, better coloured, well tasted, and suffi ciently firm. He obtained, also, well fermented bread, of a good colour and taste, from a mixture of raw pota toe pulp, with meal of wheat, or potatoe meal, with the addition of yeast and salt After repeated trials, he re commends the mixture of potatoes, in time of scarcity, with the flour of wheat, in preference to rye, barley, or oats ; when no grain can be procured, he recommends the use of bread made from a mixture of the amylace ous powder of potatoes and their pulp. fermented with leaven or honey. The meal of potatoes, diluted with water, acquires a tenacious and gluey consistence. Bread, however, made of this meal. with the flour of wheat, has a grey colour ; but that made of a mixture of the pulp of potatoes, with the flour of wheat, is sufficiently white. Parmentier made bread very much resembling that of wheat, by mixing four ounces of amylaceous powder of potatoes. one dram of mucilage extracted from barley, one drain of the bran of rye, and one-half dram of glu tinous matter, dried and pounded into powder.
M. Duduit de Maizieres, a French officer of the king's household, invented and practised with the greatest suc cess, a method of making bread of common apples, very far superior to potatoe bread. After having boiled one third of peeled apples, he bruised them, while quite warm, into two-thirds of flour, including the proper quantity of leaven, and kneaded the whole without water, the juice of the fruit being quite sufficient. When this mixture had acquired the consistency of paste, he put it into a vessel, in which he allowed it to rise for about twelve hours. By this process he obtained a very sweet bread, full of eyes and extremely light.
The Norwegians make bread of barley and oatmeal, baked between two stones. This bread improves with age, and may be kept thirty or forty years. At their great festivals they use the oldest bread; and it is not unusual, at the baptism of a child, to have bread which had been baked at the baptism of the grandfather.
At Debretzin, in Hungary, excellent bread is made by the following process, without yeast : Two large handfuls of hops are boiled in four quarts of water ; this is poured upon as much wheaten bran as it will moisten, and to ,this are added four or five pounds of leaven. When the mass is warm, the several ingredients are worked together till well mixed. It is then deposited in a warm place for twenty-four hours, and afterwards divided into small pieces, about the size of a hen's egg, which are dried by being placed upon a board, and ex posed to a dry air, but not to the sun ; when dry, they are laid up for use, and may be kept half a year. The
ferment, thus prepared, is applied in the following man ner : For baking six large loaves, six good handfuls of these balls are dissolved in seven or eight quarts of warm water ; this water is poured through a sieve into one end of the bread trough, and after it three quarts of warm water ; the remaining mass being well pressed out. The liquor is mixed up with flour, sufficient to form a mass of the size of a large loaf ; this is strewed over with flour : the sieve, with its contents, is put upon it, and the whole is covered up warm, and left till it has risen enough, and its surface has begun to crack : this forms the leaven. Fifteen quarts of warm water, in which six handfuls of salt have been dissolved, are then poured upon it through the sieve ; the necessary quantity of flour is added. and mixed and kneaded with the leaven: this is covered up warm, and left for about half an hour. It is then twined into loaves, which are kept for ano ther half hour in a warm room ; and after that they are put into the oven, where they remain two or three hours, according to their size. One great advantage attends this kind of ferment, that it may be made in large quan tities at a time, and kept for use ; and, on this account, it might be convenient on board of ships, or in camps for armies in the field.
In the absence of any of the farinaceous vegetables which we have mentionod, various substitutes for bread have been employed in different parts of the world. By far the most valuable of these substitutes is the fruit of the bread tree, which is common in many parts of the the East. It abounds particularly at Surinam, where extensive alleys may be seen of this tree alone, loaded with the most luxuriant crops of fruit. As this tree is to be described in a separate article, we forbear enter ing into any minute account of it at present, or of the manner in which it is prepared. See BREAD Tree. In Iceiand, Lapland, Crim Tartary, and various parts in the north, a kind of bread is made of dried fish, beaten first into powder, and then made up into cakes. But the strangest substitute for corn that has ever been em ployed, is a sort of white earth, found in the lordship of Moscow, in upper Lusatia, of which the poor, in times of 1..mine, have frequently been compelled to make bread. This earth is dug out of a hill where saltpetre had formerly been worked: when heated by the sun it cracks, and small globules proceed from it like meal. which ferment when mixed with flour. On this earth. baked into bread, many persons have subsisted for a con siderable time. A similar earth is found near Geronne in Catalonia.