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Graham Cookies
2 Eggs, 2 cups Buttermilk, 2 cups Graham Flour, 1 cup pastry Flour, 2 cups Sugar, 1/2 cup Butter, (melted) 2 even teaspoonfuls The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda or Saleratus. 2 even teaspoonfuls The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda or Saleratus.
Mix the eggs, sugar, melted butter. Add the but. termilk, Soda and flour and mix as for cookies. Roll out into 1/8 inch thick sheets and cut out with a square cutter or sharp knife. Bake in flour-dusted tins. Oven not very hot.
A rolled buttermilk cookie from a soda company's promotional pamphlet, so the leavening is the point of the recipe. A few things in the text need untangling before you start.
- The missing eggsThe ingredient list gives no eggs, but the method begins "Mix the eggs, sugar, melted butter." The omission looks like a printing error rather than a technique; two eggs would be a reasonable quantity for this much flour and fat.
- Saleratus is baking sodaThe recipe itself offers them as alternatives ("Soda or Saleratus"), and in an Arm & Hammer pamphlet the word is advertising. The company's product was sodium bicarbonate, so modern baking soda is the same thing, measured the same way. Two teaspoons against two cups of buttermilk is generous — the usual proportion is nearer half a teaspoon per cup.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground with the bran and germ left in. Whole-wheat flour is the nearest substitute; whole-wheat pastry flour is closer still. The one cup of pastry flour is there to keep the dough tender, so use a low-protein white flour rather than bread flour.
- "Oven not very hot"A moderate oven, somewhere around 325-350F. Anything hotter and the sugar in a sheet this thin scorches on the bran before the centre sets.
- Thickness and timeAt an eighth of an inch these bake in about 8 to 10 minutes and go from pale to burnt quickly. Pull them when the edges have just coloured; they crisp as they cool.
- The dough will be softTwo cups of sugar against three cups of flour makes a slack dough that fights a rolling pin. Chill it at least an hour, roll it between sheets of parchment, and flour the cutter.
- Flour-dusted tinsThe original assumes bare tin sheets dusted with flour. Parchment or a silicone mat does the job better with a sugar-heavy dough.
- YieldA large batch: several dozen two-inch squares at least, depending on how thin you roll.
Arm & Hammer's recipe booklets were given away by the box, and their purpose was to demonstrate that saleratus was reliable, uniform and worth buying by brand rather than scooping from a grocer's barrel. Buttermilk recipes did that work particularly well: the acid in the milk and the alkali in the soda react visibly, and the cook can see the leavening happen. Graham flour carried its own argument. It takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached unbolted wheat against the fashionable white flour of the day; by the end of the century his name had detached from the movement and simply meant coarse whole-wheat, sold as a wholesome everyday ingredient. A square-cut graham cookie of this kind sat somewhere between a biscuit and a cracker, rolled thin and cut with a knife or a square cutter.