Home › Breads › Excellent Graham Bread
Excellent Graham Bread
2 cupfuls graham flour 4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1/2 cupful flour 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1 1/2 cupfuls sour milk 1/4 cupful sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful baking soda Sift flours with baking powder, salt, sugar, and soda, then add Crisco and milk. Mix and turn into greased and floured cake tin and bake in moderate oven fifty minutes.
Sufficient for one small loaf.
A quick bread, chemically leavened, mixed and in the pan in under ten minutes. The only real translation needed is the sour milk and the oven setting.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the direct modern stand-in, cup for cup; pasteurised milk left out simply spoils rather than souring usefully.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat, including bran and germ, named for Sylvester Graham. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest thing on a shelf today; ordinary fine whole wheat flour works but gives a tighter crumb.
- Moderate ovenConventionally somewhere around 350-375F for period recipes; 350F is a safe reading. Fifty minutes should suit a small loaf, but test with a skewer at 45 minutes.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it, and any neutral solid shortening will stand in directly; melted butter or oil works too, though butter's water content and oil's liquidity change the crumb a little. Melt it and let it cool slightly so it does not seize when it hits cold buttermilk.
- Both soda and baking powderThe soda neutralises the acid in the sour milk; the teaspoon of baking powder supplies the extra lift once that reaction is spent. If you substitute sweet milk, the soda has nothing to work on and the loaf will taste faintly soapy.
- "Cake tin"An 8x4 inch loaf pan suits "one small loaf." A round 8-inch cake pan also works and gives a shallower, faster-baking bread.
- MixingStir only until the flour is wet. This is a batter bread, not a dough, and beating it develops gluten that turns the crumb rubbery.
- YieldOne small loaf, roughly ten slices. It stales quickly, as whole-grain quick breads do; it is best the day it is baked and good toasted the next.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company introduced in 1911 -- which is why melted Crisco appears in a plain graham loaf where an older cookbook would have said butter, lard or drippings. The flour itself carries an older piece of American reform history: graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the 1830s temperance preacher and dietary reformer who argued that unsifted whole-wheat meal was healthier and more virtuous than the fine white flour of commercial bakers. By the time of this book the moral argument had largely faded and graham flour had settled into ordinary use as a wholesome, slightly nutty everyday bread flour, appearing both in yeast loaves and, as here, in soda-and-sour-milk quick breads.