[Sca-cooks] Leven: yeast or sourdough?

Johnna Holloway johnnae at mac.com
Mon Oct 11 05:01:17 PDT 2010


Elizabeth David's  English Bread and Yeast Cookery is still excellent  
on the topic.
There's 30 pages on yeast in the 1977, reprinted 1978 original English  
editions.

OED defines leaven as a noun as "A substance which is added to dough  
to produce fermentation; spec. a quantity of fermenting dough reserved  
from a previous batch to be used for this purpose (cf. sour-dough)."

With quotations such as:
1471 RIPLEY Comp. Alch. IX. viii. in Ashm. (1652) 175 Lyke as flower  
of Whete made into Past, Requyreth Ferment whych Leven we call.
1699 EVELYN Acetaria 53 Add a Pound of Wheat-flour, fermented with a  
little Levain.

Johnnae

On Oct 10, 2010, at 4:23 PM, David Friedman wrote:

> Recipes frequently don't say--and if they do refer to yeast,  
> especially in a translation, the word might actually mean sourdough.  
> I gather that sourdough, technically, is not yeast but a different  
> organism with similar effects, but even assuming that's right, there  
> is no reason to expect people in period to know.
> Our working assumption is that "berme" means yeast from beer residue  
> and that otherwise the leven is beer yeast in beer drinking areas,  
> sourdough in areas that don't drink beer, including the Islamic  
> world. But I don't think we have any really solid evidence on the  
> subject--does anyone else?




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