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Brown Bran Bread
Add 2 1/2 cups bran Mix 1 or 2 yeast cakes with 1 pint warm water and Five Roses flour to batter same as for white bread. Let stand 3 hours or more to rise. Into bread mixer (about 9 o'clock) put ½ cup molasses 1 tablespoon brown sugar 1 teaspoon salt Butter size of walnut 1 pint warm water Add yeast and stir well Add 2 cups bran 3 cups Graham flour 2 cups (or more) Five Roses.
Mix and leave to rise in warm place overnight. In morning, shape into loaves, set to rise 1 hour, then bake 1 hour.
A two-stage overnight bread: a loose flour-and-water sponge in the afternoon, the full dough mixed at nine, shaped and baked the next morning. The original assumes a wood or coal range, so no temperature is given.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none; a moderate oven, around 375F, suits it. An hour is right for large loaves in heavy pans, but check at 40 minutes; the loaf is done at an internal temperature of 190-200F and should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.
- Yeast cakesA yeast cake of this period was either a small block of compressed fresh yeast, roughly 0.6 oz, or a dried yeast cake; the long sponge suits either. One packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast is a workable substitute for one cake. Given the long sponge and overnight bulk, use one, not two.
- The bread mixerA hand-cranked pail with a dough hook in the lid, sold for home use in this period, though how widely they were owned is not documented. A stand mixer with a dough hook does the same work, or mix by hand in a large bowl and knead on the bench.
- Butter size of walnutAbout 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Shelled walnut, not the whole nut in its shell.
- Bran and Graham flourBran means plain unprocessed wheat bran, not a breakfast cereal. Graham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour milled with the germ and bran included; whole-wheat flour is the closest supermarket equivalent, and stone-ground gives the nearer texture.
- The vague flour quantity"2 cups (or more)" is the only real judgement call. Bran and whole wheat drink up water slowly, so add white flour until the dough is soft and slightly tacky rather than dry, then stop; bran-heavy doughs stiffen considerably as they sit.
- The overnight riseA kitchen of this period cooled off overnight once the range died down. A modern 70F room may well overproof this dough. Leave it at cool room temperature or refrigerate it, and let it come back to room temperature before shaping.
- YieldTwo pints of liquid, plus the unmeasured flour in the sponge and the seven-plus cups added later, should make roughly three standard 9x5 loaves. Expect a dense, close, moist crumb; this is not a light bread and will not rise dramatically in the pan.
Bran bread belongs to the health-flour enthusiasm that ran from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, generally traced to Sylvester Graham, the American preacher whose name still attaches to coarse whole-wheat flour and who argued that milling the bran out of wheat was both unnatural and unhealthy. By the time the Five Roses Cook Book was compiled for Canadian households by Lake of the Woods Milling Company, bran and Graham flour had settled into the ordinary domestic repertoire, and a miller of white flour was happy enough to print recipes that used its product as one component among several. The molasses is doing double duty here, coloring the loaf and feeding the yeast, which needs the help: bran cuts gluten strands and weighs a dough down, which is why this one gets a sponge and a full overnight rise rather than the single quick proof a white loaf would get.