common sized family ovens, provided brown bread and beans are to be
baked. An hour is long enough to heat an oven for flour bread. Pies
bear about as much heat as flour bread: pumpkin pies will bear more.
If you are afraid your oven is too hot, throw in a little flour, and
shut it up for a minute. If it scorches black immediately, the heat is
too furious; if it merely browns, it is right. Some people wet an old
broom two or three times, and turn it round near the top of die oven
till it dries; this prevents pies and cake from scorching on the top.
When you go into a new house, heat your oven two or three times, to
get it seasoned, before you use it. After the wood is burned, rake the
coals over the bottom of the oven, and let them lie a few minutes.

Those who make their own bread should make yeast too. When bread is
nearly out, always think whether yeast is in readiness; for it takes
a day and night to prepare it. One handful of hops, with two or three
handsful of malt and rye bran, should be boiled fifteen or twenty
minutes, in two quarts of water, then strained, hung on to boil again,
and thickened with half a pint of rye and water stirred up quite
thick, and a little molasses; boil it a minute or two, and then take
it off to cool. When just about lukewarm, put in a cupful of good
lively yeast, and set it in a cool place in summer, and warm place
in winter. If it is too warm when you put in the old yeast, all the
spirit will be killed.

In summer, yeast sours easily; therefore make but little at a time.
Bottle it when it gets well a working; it keeps better when the air
is corked out. If you find it acid, but still spirited, put a little
pearlash to it, as you use it; but by no means put it into your bread
unless it foams up bright and lively as soon as the pearlash mixes
with it. Never keep yeast in tin; it destroys its life.