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BRAN BISCUITS
Take cup bran (as prepared by Davis & Taylor, 24 Canal Street, Boston), five cups sifted flour; scald the bran at tea-time with half pint boiling water; when cool, pour it into the middle of the flour, add onehalf cup good yeast (or part of a yeast-cake, soaked till light), one tea-spoon salt, and two table-spoons sugar; wet with new milk into soft dough, much thicker than batter. Let it stand, covered closely, in a warm place to rise. In the morning, spoon into hot gem or patty-pans, and bake in a quick oven to a brown crust. Part of the dough may be baked in a small loaf to be eaten warm. (It can be made with water by using a little butter, but is not so good.) Any remaining may be split for dinner or toasted for tea.
An overnight sponge dough, mixed at teatime and baked at breakfast. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures and vessels need translating.
- The bran quantity is ambiguousThe original reads "Take cup bran," probably one cup, though the missing numeral cannot be recovered with certainty. Much more than that against five cups of flour would tend toward a dense, crumbly biscuit.
- The branded branDavis & Taylor of Canal Street, Boston, was a local supplier and the address is of no use now. Plain unprocessed wheat bran from the baking aisle is the same material; avoid bran cereal, which is sweetened and already cooked.
- Half pint boiling waterOne cup. Scalding the bran softens the sharp husk and lets it absorb liquid overnight, which is why the step is done hours before mixing.
- Half a cup of yeastThis means liquid yeast or barm, a home-kept ferment generally weaker and less predictable than modern yeast. Something in the order of 1 to 2 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast will do the same work over a long overnight rise; the alternative given, part of a yeast-cake soaked till light, may be either a dried home-made yeast cake or compressed fresh yeast, both current at the date.
- New milkFresh whole milk, unsoured. Warm it to blood heat before wetting the dough so the yeast is not chilled.
- The overnight riseA "warm place" in an 1877 kitchen usually meant a cooling range or a shelf near the flue, which would often be cooler than a modern heated room by morning. At around 70F the dough should be ready in roughly 8 to 10 hours; much warmer and it risks over-fermenting and souring by dawn.
- Gem and patty pans, hotCast-iron gem pans, the ancestor of the muffin tin. Heat the greased pan in the oven before spooning in the dough; the dough is soft and needs the immediate set that a hot pan gives.
- A quick ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a quick oven is usually reckoned at roughly 400 to 425F. Gems take about 15 to 20 minutes; the small loaf, if you make one, will need longer, and is best judged by eye rather than by a stated time.
- YieldThe recipe gives no count; expect somewhere in the region of a dozen to eighteen gems, or fewer if part of the dough goes into the small loaf. The closing note about splitting or toasting the leftovers is sound advice, as these stale quickly.
Bran biscuits sit in the "Food For The Sick" chapter because bran, through much of the nineteenth century, was often regarded less as a nutrient than as a mild medicine, prescribed for constipation and the vaguely defined dyspepsia that filled invalid cookery. The enthusiasm is generally traced to Sylvester Graham and the whole-meal reformers of the 1830s and 40s, whose argument that overly refined white flour weakened the digestion had, by the time Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, spread well beyond the reform movement itself. The naming of a specific Boston firm as the source of the bran is a period habit worth noticing: millers' bran was a byproduct sold largely as animal feed, so a cook wanting it clean and fine enough for the sickroom would have looked to a supplier who prepared it for the table. The overnight sponge, mixed at tea-time and baked at breakfast, suits a kitchen where the fire was banked rather than switched off, and where bread-making was fitted into the day's existing rhythm.