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Brown Bread (Yeast)
1 cup yeast or ¼ cake dissolved in 1 cup water (liquid yeast preferred) 3 cups scalded milk 1 or 2 tablespoons molasses 2 small teaspoons salt.
Equal parts Graham and Five Roses flour to make a dough as stiff as you can mix it with a strong spoon, but too soft to handle comfortably.
Cover and let rise to double its original size. Mix down and let rise again. Put in pans and when risen again, bake. Allow nearly as long again to bake as for white bread. Be careful to not let it overrise. 1 egg
A plain yeasted whole-meal loaf built on a very small amount of yeast and a long, slow rise. The instructions assume a cook who already bakes white bread every week, so several numbers are left out; here is what to fill in.
- The hinge: do not let it overriseWith four cups of liquid and a heavy graham dough, an overproofed loaf collapses in the oven and bakes dense and sour. Take it to the pans when doubled, and into the oven when the dough has crowned just above the rim, not when it has domed and started to slacken.
- Yeast quantities"1 cup yeast" means a cup of homemade liquid yeast, a wet starter kept in the pantry, which has no reliable modern equivalent. The alternative given, a quarter of a compressed cake, is somewhere in the region of half a teaspoon to a teaspoon of active dry yeast, depending on the size of cake intended; either way it is a small dose, so expect several hours per rise rather than one.
- Scalded milkScalding was done partly for keeping quality and partly to improve the crumb. With pasteurized milk it is optional, but if you do scald, cool the milk to about 110F before it meets the yeast.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, bran and germ included. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; it drinks more water than white flour, so the dough will feel stiff at first and loosen as it hydrates.
- The stray eggThe egg is listed at the end with no instruction. Beat it into the milk and molasses before the flour goes in.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderately hot oven, in modern terms somewhere around 350-375F, will keep the crust from blackening before the centre sets. "Nearly as long again" as a white loaf means close to double the usual time -- if your white bread takes 45 minutes, allow up to about 80. Done is an internal temperature of 190-200F.
- Yield and pansThe flour is unmeasured; four cups of liquid worked to a stiff dough will take somewhere around ten to twelve cups, enough for three standard 9x5 loaves or two large ones. Grease the pans well; graham doughs stick.
- MolassesOne to two tablespoons is for color and a faint sweetness, not a sweet loaf. Use unsulphured cooking molasses rather than blackstrap, which will dominate everything.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who campaigned for coarse, unsifted whole-wheat bread against the fashionable white loaf. By the time the Five Roses Cook Book was compiled for Canadian households in the early twentieth century, "Graham bread" had long since detached from his moral program and settled into the everyday baking repertoire as brown bread. Note that this is a yeast bread, as the title's "(Yeast)" makes plain. The instruction to substitute a quarter cake of compressed yeast for a cup of liquid yeast is a reminder of how recently home-kept yeast was normal: commercial compressed yeast was widely available by 1900, but many cooks still trusted their own, and the recipe's leading with liquid yeast says which side of that change it came from.