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Tourist Bread
Formula Hard wheat flour, 5½ lbs.
Graham flour, 1¼ lbs.
Rye flour, 1¼ lbs.
Milk, 2 qts.
Shortening, ¼ ozs.
Salt, 3 ozs.
Yeast, 3 ozs.
Molasses, 4 pt.
Chopped nuts, 4 ozs.
Method Mix the wheat flour, graham flour and rye flour, dissolve the yeast in 14 of the milk and place to one side. Put the balance of the milk, molasses, salt and shortening into a bowl and stir to dissolve the ingredients. Now add the milk, begin mixing, add the yeast and continue mixing until the dough is smooth. Add the nuts and incorporate.
Fermentation If a four hour fermentation period is required to mature the dough, it may be divided as follows: First rising, 2¼ hours; second rising, 1 hour; third rising, 1/4 hour.
Allow the dough to rest 15 minutes, when it can be divided. Do not give the dough too much proof in the pans, as it is liable to fall and make an unsightly loaf. 1
This is a bakery formula rather than a household recipe: it is written in pounds, quarts and a shop's fermentation schedule, and it assumes a mixer, a bench and compressed yeast. It scales down cleanly, but a few of the printed figures have been mangled and need reading with care.
- Damaged fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fraction marks in printing; a '¼' appears to have been reduced to a bare '4' throughout. 'Graham flour, 14 lbs' and 'Rye flour, 14 lbs' are most likely 1¼ lbs each — 14 lbs of each against 5½ lbs of wheat flour would make a dough that could not rise. Likewise 'Molasses, 4 pt' reads as ¼ pt, '14 of the milk' as ¼ of the milk, and 'First rising, 24 hours' as 2¼ hours, though that leaves the three risings somewhat short of the stated four-hour total.
- Total batch and yieldTaking the flours as 5½ + 1¼ + 1¼ lbs, you have about 8 lbs of flour and something over a dozen pounds of dough — roughly eight 1½-lb loaves. For a home batch, divide everything by eight: about 11 oz bread flour, 2½ oz graham, 2½ oz rye, a cup of milk, ½ oz shortening, and a scant ½ oz each salt and yeast.
- Hard wheat flour"Hard wheat flour" is high-protein bread flour. It is doing the structural work here, since graham and rye contribute little gluten; all-purpose will give a squatter loaf.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat, bran and germ included, named for Sylvester Graham. Stone-ground whole wheat is the closest current equivalent; it absorbs more water than white flour, so expect a stiff dough at this hydration.
- Yeast3 ozs. means compressed fresh yeast — about 2 percent of the flour weight. Use roughly a third as much instant dry yeast, or a bit under half as much active dry.
- MilkBakeries often scalded milk or worked from reconstituted dry milk. Pasteurised milk needs no scalding, but bring it to lukewarm before mixing or the fermentation times below will run long.
- The fermentation scheduleThe three 'risings' are best read as punches within a single fermentation rather than separate doughs: knock the dough back after about 2¼ hours, again after 1 hour, again after 15 minutes, then rest 15 minutes before dividing.
- The instruction that matters"Do not give the dough too much proof in the pans." Rye and bran weaken the crumb structure, so an over-proofed loaf collapses in the oven. Pan-proof to about three-quarters of the finished height, no further.
- BakingNo oven temperature is given. A pan loaf of this weight and composition wants a moderately hot oven, around 400°F, for 35–45 minutes, until the internal temperature reaches about 200°F.
Formulas like this one were printed for bakers looking to put something novel in the window, and "tourist bread" sits among the nut-and-molasses whole grain loaves sold as wholesome and portable — kin to the nut breads, health breads and Boston-style brown breads. The graham flour in it points back to Sylvester Graham's mid-nineteenth-century campaign for unsifted wheat meal, whose vocabulary long outlived his following and survived as a flour name and a cracker. The name itself reads as commercial rather than geographic: a dense, sweet, keeping loaf with nuts in it was the sort of thing marketed for picnic baskets and travel. Note the shop assumptions throughout — ingredients weighed in pounds and ounces, yeast bought fresh by the ounce, and a fermentation broken into timed punches to suit a working day.</p>