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Quick Brown Bread
1 egg. 1 cup brown sugar 2 cups buttermilk (or sour milk) 1 teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon salt (small) Graham flour Mix stiff like Johnnie cake with Graham flour and bake like ordinary bread.
A chemically leavened loaf with no flour measurement at all — the cook was expected to judge by feel. The rest is straightforward, but a few of the terms need translating.
- The missing flour quantityThe original gives no amount, only a consistency. With 2 cups buttermilk and 1 cup brown sugar, expect somewhere around 3 to 3½ cups graham flour, added gradually until the batter is thick and barely pourable. Treat any figure as a starting point rather than a conversion.
- "Stiff like Johnnie cake"Johnnycake mixtures were generally thick rather than kneadable dough, though the consistency varied by region; taken here it points to a batter that mounds on the spoon and settles slowly rather than running. Stop adding flour when a spoonful holds its shape for a second or two.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, ground from the entire kernel and traditionally not sifted. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; standard whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer, less nubbly crumb.
- Buttermilk or sour milkCultured buttermilk from a carton is fine. If substituting, add 2 tablespoons lemon juice or white vinegar to 2 cups milk and let it stand ten minutes — the acid is what activates the soda.
- Work quicklyThere is no yeast here. The soda begins reacting the moment it meets the buttermilk, so mix only until combined and get the loaf into a preheated oven; a batter left standing loses much of its lift.
- "Bake like ordinary bread"The original specifies no temperature, time or pan. As a modern starting point, a greased 9x5-inch loaf pan at 350F for roughly 45 to 60 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the internal temperature is around 200F. Brown sugar and whole-wheat flour both darken fast, so tent with foil if the top colors before the center sets.
- Yield and keepingOne large loaf, about twelve slices. Best eaten fresh; after a day or two it wants toasting and butter.
Quick breads of this sort belong to the era when baking soda and sour milk let a household put bread on the table without waiting on yeast — a real convenience in a kitchen where the milk soured on its own anyway and nothing was thrown out. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance and dietary reformer of the 1830s whose followers promoted coarse unsifted whole-meal flour as morally and digestively superior to white; by the time the Five Roses book was compiled the name had long outlived the movement and simply meant whole-wheat. The recipe's shorthand — "stiff like Johnnie cake," "bake like ordinary bread" — is typical of contributed recipes in milling-company cookbooks, which assumed a reader who already knew what those things looked like and needed only the proportions.