Graham Paste
Mix lightly half a pound Graham flour, half a pint sweet cream, half a teaspoon salt, roll, and bake like other pastry.
A three-ingredient short crust that uses cream instead of lard or butter — the fat and the liquid arrive together. It behaves differently from a water-and-shortening pastry and wants a different hand.
- The measurements in modern termsHalf a pound of Graham flour is roughly 1¾ to 2 cups, and half a pint of cream is 1 cup. Weigh the flour if you can: whole-grain flours vary enough by grind that a cup measure can be off by an ounce or more.
- "Sweet cream" means unsouredIn nineteenth-century usage the distinction was between sweet cream and cream that had soured standing in the dairy. Modern heavy cream (around 36% fat) is the closest substitute, and here the cream supplies all the shortening in the dough.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, bran and germ included, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern graham flour or a stone-ground whole-wheat will both work; regular whole-wheat flour gives a slightly finer, less nubbly crust.
- Add the cream graduallyA cup may be more than your flour needs, or slightly less. Hold back a few tablespoons, mix to a dough that just coheres, and add the rest only if it is crumbly.
- "Mix lightly" is the hingeWith no chilled solid fat to create flakiness, this crust depends entirely on minimal handling. Bring it together with a fork or a few turns of the hand and stop; a kneaded graham dough bakes hard and dense.
- Rest before rollingWhole-grain flour rolls out badly until the bran has softened. Twenty minutes wrapped in the refrigerator makes the dough far less inclined to crack at the edges, and it patches easily if it does.
- Temperature for "bake like other pastry"The original gives no heat, so this is a modern guess: for a blind-baked shell, around 425F for 12 to 15 minutes, weighted with beans or pie weights. Watch it near the end, as whole-grain crusts darken faster than white flour ones.
- YieldRoughly enough for a 9-inch top and bottom, or two single 9-inch shells.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer who in the 1830s preached that unsifted, coarsely ground wheat was essential to health and that white bread was a species of dietary vice. By the time Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877 — a Marysville, Ohio book, hence the name, with Minneapolis printings coming later — "Graham" seems to have been less a reform banner than an ordinary shelf item: the book uses it for gems, muffins, bread and, here, pastry. The recipe is also a reminder of how much a farm household's baking depended on the dairy: where a modern crust reaches for butter or shortening, this one reaches for the cream that was already skimmed and standing, and the whole formula fits in one line because nothing in it needed explaining.