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Whole-Meal Bread, to Bake
To derive from whole-meal bread all the advantages which it will undoubtedly yield, the following points should be observed. The corn should not be damped before it is ground, and it should lie over for some weeks, and be kept very dry after the grinding before it is converted into bread. Just at first it will be well to mix a certain portion of flour with it for persons who are not in strong health, or who are unaccustomed to eat brown bread, as it will otherwise occasion a little irritation in the stomach for a few days; but this is easily avoided by using it only in part for a time, and by diminishing at each baking the proportion of flour added to it. In making dough with the whole meal, it will be seen that it absorbs more liquid than flour does, and requires rather more yeast to render it light, or a longer time to rise. It should not be made very stiff, or it will be too dry after it is baked, yet it should always be workable, and not stick to the hands. If well managed, its flavour will be peculiarly sweet and agreeable. It is prepared in precisely the same manner as white bread. Whole meal, one gallon; good flour, one gallon; fresh German yeast, two ounces and a half, or well washed beer yeast, two table-spoonfuls; salt, four to six spoonfuls, or one ounce to one and a half; warm water, or milk and water, full three quarts. Give it to rise from one hour to one hour and a half the first time, or until it is evidently quite light; the second time about an hour. To be well baked in a moderately-heated oven. Or, whole meal, seven pounds; flour, three pounds and a half; solid beer yeast, three large dessert-spoonfuls, or fresh German yeast, nearly two ounces; liquid, rather more than four pints and a quarter; salt as above. Or, whole meal, one gallon; German yeast, one ounce and a quarter in summer, one ounce and a half in winter, or solid brewer's yeast, three dessert-spoonfuls; all else as in the foregoing recipe. It is to be observed that about an ounce or a moderate-sized table-spoonful of salt to the gallon of flour is sufficient to remove any insipidity of flavour from bread, but a larger proportion is liked by many persons. Not only will a smaller quantity of yeast be required in summer than in very cold weather for the fermentation of dough, but the liquid used in making it will require to be less warm than in winter. Experienced bread-makers recommend that it should then be used at blood-heat (98 deg.).
A set of proportions rather than a method: the dough is handled exactly as for white bread, and the interest lies in the ratios and in how whole meal behaves differently from white flour. Scale everything down before you start, as the smallest of the three formulas still makes about four large loaves.
- The hinge: hydrationWhole meal absorbs considerably more water than white flour, and the recipe is right to warn against a stiff dough. The book's liquid quantities are hard to reduce to a single percentage, since the volume formula and the weighed one do not agree with each other; modern whole wheat generally takes 70 to 75 per cent. Hold back some liquid, then add it until the dough is soft but not tacky.
- A gallon of flourFlour was sold and measured by dry volume, and the book never states what a gallon of meal weighs, which is presumably why it offers a weighed alternative. Use the weights: 7 lb whole meal to 3 1/2 lb white flour, and ignore the gallons.
- German yeast"Fresh German yeast" is compressed baker's yeast. Two and a half ounces of it corresponds to roughly 25 g of instant dried yeast, or about 12 g for the one-ounce-and-a-quarter summer quantity. "Solid beer yeast" or brewer's yeast is skimmed barm from a working brew, effectively unobtainable now and no longer washed and reused; substitute commercial yeast.
- SaltAn ounce to an ounce and a half per gallon of meal works out somewhere in the region of 1 to 2 per cent of the flour weight, depending on what a gallon is taken to weigh; note that in the first formula the same 1 to 1 1/2 oz covers two gallons of dry ingredients, which is lighter than modern practice. The "four to six spoonfuls" is the same quantity measured loosely.
- A moderately-heated ovenFor bread this means a brick oven falling from its bread heat, not the 350F a modern cook would call moderate. Bake loaves at 400 to 425F. Whole-meal loaves are done at an internal temperature of 200 to 210F and sound hollow when rapped underneath.
- Keeping the meal dry for weeksThis advice belongs to stone-ground meal fresh from a mill, where a rest allowed it to dry and mature into stronger dough. Whole meal's germ oil turns rancid within a few months, so buy it fresh, smell it before use, and keep it in the freezer rather than laying it by.
- Blood-heat water98F is the upper end of what is comfortable for yeast and reflects a cold Victorian kitchen. In a heated room, 80 to 85F gives better control; the first rise of one to one and a half hours and the second of about an hour will then hold roughly true.
- YieldThe full quantity makes eight or so 2 lb loaves. For a single loaf, scale right down: roughly 300 g whole meal, 150 g white flour, 6 g instant yeast, 6 g salt and 300 to 330 ml water.
Cassell's is writing at the height of the Victorian brown-bread argument, when white flour was cheap and widely preferred and whole meal had to be argued for on health grounds. The careful advice about mixing in white flour at first, and about the stomach irritation of unaccustomed eaters, reflects a period when bran was widely regarded as an irritant rather than a virtue; the campaigning physician Thomas Allinson, whose published advocacy for whole-meal bread belongs to the late 1880s and 1890s, was working against exactly that assumption. The passage's tone and much of its detail sit close to the mid-century bread-reform literature, in particular Eliza Acton's The English Bread-Book of 1857, which likewise gave weighed alternatives beside the older gallon measures and fussed over the difference between summer and winter yeast. That doubled set of measurements is itself the historical marker: the household was passing from measuring flour by the peck and gallon to weighing it.