THE first and most important " must-have " is good yeast. I have come to depend almost wholly and with the most perfect trust on compressed yeast. If your grocer keeps yeast at all, it will be fresh, the manufacturer sees to that, as the stock of each day is renewed and the old yeast cakes are taken away. Still, if you keep it yourself for a few days in a refrigerator it will not spoil. Yeast which is moist, light colored, and of " reviving smell," as an old lady I know expressed it, is all right. If it gets dry, brittle, streaky, and smells the opposite of " reviving," throw it away; better lose two cents than twenty cents' worth of flour, with fire and labor added. Be very careful of the heat of the water in which yeast is softened. If you have a thermometer, let the water be sixty-eight degrees; if you have to trust to your hand, let it be very surely no more than lukewarm.

Then the flour - it is an invariable rule to use bread flour when yeast is to be added. Bread flour will make tolerable pie or cake, but pastry flour will not make good bread. If, as occasionally occurs, you have flour whose nature you cannot determine, use the following test: take a handful and close the fingers tightly over it. If it remains in a soft velvety lump, even after the fingers are loosened, it is pastry flour. Bread flour will be dry and loose, it will not keep in shape.

According to the time at your disposal, allow sufficient yeast for raising. For instance, if bread is wanted made and baked in four hours, two yeast cakes would have to be allowed to the recipe I have given. There is no danger, should compressed yeast be used, of its tasting in the bread. This is called the quick-raising method. In a temperature of about sixty-eight degrees it will be ready to mold two and a half hours from the time it was set. It will be quite as good bread as that made after the slow-raising method, although I think the latter will keep moist for a longer time.

I have heard many housewives complain of bread souring. Bread sours only because of two reasons - uncleanliness in the making or the utensils, or because it was allowed to stand too long after mixing. When that occurs, the yeast has done its work completely, and the dangerous bacteria get in their work, exactly in the same way as at the point where cider changes to vinegar. I have found, too, that in hot weather milk bread will sour much more quickly than if bread is mixed with water. Then there is the dry bread, with a heavy feeling about it, both to the touch and to the palate. Usually this is caused either by too much flour being worked into the dough or by heavy-handed kneading. Bread, like cake, pastry, cookies, and biscuit, has a point where just enough flour has been added and where no more ought to go in. This amount it is almost impossible for a recipe maker to determine, because there are so many flours and the wetting capacities of two are hardly ever alike. It is a case of experience. A practiced hand can tell almost the instant when enough flour has gone into bread by a certain springy feeling. Then tip it out and begin kneading. It may seem moist, but it is not moist enough to stick if you intervene with well-floured fingers between the dough and the cloth. Knead quickly and lightly; a heavy hand which pounds bread instead of molding it will soon thump all the life out of it, and the bread will have the texture of cheese.