Graham Bread
1 qt. cold sour Milk, 1/2 pt. dark Molasses, 4 cups Graham Flour, 3 even teaspoonfuls The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 4 cups Bread Flour, 3 teaspoonfuls Salt, 2 teaspoonfuls Brown Sugar.
Mix together the cold sour milk, dark molasses and three even teaspoonfuls The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. Mix together separately, four cups Graham flour, four cups bread flour, three even teaspoonfuls salt, two teaspoonfuls brown sugar; then stir all together to make a soft dough. Adding three or four teaspoonfuls of salad-oil or melted lard makes the dough much smoother. Have the pans well greased and let the bread stand a few minutes before putting it in the oven. Bake in not too hot an oven, from 40 to 50 minutes.
A soda-raised quick bread from a baking soda company's promotional pamphlet, so the soda is doing all the lifting. The dough is stirred, not kneaded, and should go into the oven promptly.
- The hinge: work fastOnce the soda meets the sour milk and molasses the gas begins escaping immediately. Combine wet and dry only until no flour streaks remain, get it into the pans, and bake. The instruction to "let the bread stand a few minutes" is presumably about letting the dough settle into the pans rather than a rise in the yeast sense, though the recipe does not say.
- Sour milkThis means raw milk that has clabbered naturally and turned acidic. Pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than sours and should not be used. Cultured buttermilk is the standard substitute, quart for quart; failing that, whole milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup.
- MeasuresA quart of milk is 4 cups; half a pint of molasses is 1 cup. That is a substantial batch, enough for two 9x5 loaf pans or three smaller ones.
- The sodaThree teaspoons across a quart of sour milk plus a cup of molasses is at the upper end of what the acid can neutralise. Level the spoonfuls carefully, as the recipe insists; excess soda leaves a soapy taste and a grey, coarse crumb.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat, including the bran and germ, of the kind Sylvester Graham advocated. Modern stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest thing; ordinary fine whole wheat works but gives a less nubbly loaf.
- Oven temperature"Not too hot" points to a moderate oven; something in the region of 325-350F is a reasonable modern reading, though the recipe gives no figure. A dark, molasses-heavy dough scorches at the crust before the centre sets if pushed higher.
- DonenessForty to fifty minutes suits a moderate loaf pan, but the loaves are dense and wet. Check the centre at 200-205F internal, or for a skewer that comes out clean rather than tacky.
- FatThe optional "salad-oil or melted lard" is worth including. Three or four teaspoons is little enough to be lost in the crumb but it makes the dough easier to stir and the bread less crumbly to slice.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose 1830s campaigning against refined white flour made unbolted wheat meal a moral cause as much as a food. By the time this pamphlet appeared, graham bread had settled into ordinary American home baking, stripped of most of its reforming zeal and treated simply as a dark, sweet, useful everyday loaf. The recipe belongs to a whole genre of promotional cookery: Church & Dwight, whose Arm & Hammer brand dates to the 1860s, distributed small recipe booklets that put the product name in the ingredient list as often as possible. Soda breads made with sour milk were the natural showcase, since the reaction between clabbered milk and bicarbonate is quick, visible, and needs no yeast, no proofing and no baker's skill.