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Graham Bread (Mix three quarts Graham flour)
Mix three quarts Graham flour, one quart warm water, half pint yeast, a quarter-pint molasses, and one table-spoon salt, thoroughly; put in well-buttered pans, and leave in a warm place to rise, or let it rise over night at 60°. If left to rise slowly, let it remain in the bowl in which it was mixed, and unless very light when put in pans, let it stand fifteen or twenty minutes before putting in the oven.
A single-rise molasses whole-wheat loaf from the era when "yeast" meant a jar of liquid ferment kept on the pantry shelf. Two things need translating before it works: the yeast and the missing oven temperature.
- The half pint of yeastThis is homemade liquid yeast or barm — about a cup of active ferment, not a cup of dry granules. Substitute roughly 2 teaspoons instant or one packet of active dry yeast, and hold back about half a cup of the water to account for the liquid you are no longer adding.
- Flour by volumeThree quarts of Graham flour is about 12 cups, or 3 to 3 1/2 lb. Modern whole-wheat flour is milled finer than nineteenth-century Graham; if you can find coarse or stone-ground whole wheat, the texture will be closer to the original.
- No oven temperature givenBuckeye Cookery assumes a wood range and a practiced hand. Bake at 375°F for 45 to 55 minutes, until the loaves sound hollow and register 200-205°F at the center. Whole-grain loaves this wet read done outside long before the crumb is set.
- Rising at 60 degreesThat is the temperature of an unheated kitchen overnight, not a modern room. A 60°F rise will take 8 to 12 hours; the same dough at 75°F will be ready in 2 to 3 hours and will taste noticeably less sour.
- Only one riseThe dough goes into buttered pans and rises once. The bran in Graham flour interferes with gluten development, so there is less to be gained from a second rise, and the fifteen or twenty minutes of standing the recipe allows "unless very light when put in pans" reads as a way of catching a batch that went into the pans underproofed.
- The molasses is structuralA quarter-pint is half a cup. It feeds the yeast, keeps the crumb moist, and darkens the loaf. Cutting it will give you a drier, paler, tighter bread rather than simply a less sweet one.
- ConsistencyThe liquid runs high for the amount of flour, so expect a soft, slack, sticky dough; the recipe never mentions kneading, only putting it in well-buttered pans. Do not fill the pans much more than two-thirds full.
- YieldEnough for three standard 9x5 loaves, or two large ones. The recipe scales down cleanly by half.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose lectures in the 1830s urged Americans to eat coarse, unsifted, home-milled wheat rather than the fine white flour of commercial bakers. By the time Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, the crusading edge had worn off and Graham bread had become a household staple -- a plain, slightly sweet brown loaf that appears in a great many American community cookbooks of the period, often more than once with small variations in molasses and yeast. The liquid yeast called for here suits the date: compressed cake yeast was only beginning to reach ordinary kitchens in the later 1870s, and home-maintained hop or potato ferments were still common, which is why books of the era so often open their bread chapter with instructions for making yeast before any bread at all.