Converting yeast amounts from old recipes This recipe for poppy seed rolls calls for 1 large yeast. How much yeast am I supposed to use? I usually see recipes measure it in teaspoons, but I can’t guess how much “large” is. I am also assuming this is active dry yeast, maybe it’s not and that’s the reason why the size is weird.
This is short for “1 large cake of yeast.” According to this investigation, cakes of yeast traditionally came in two sizes:


Small, around 3/5 of an ounce
Large, around 2 ounces


This similar recipe gives the substitution “1 large yeast or 3 envelopes dry yeast.”’