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Whole Wheat Bread
2 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons soda 2 teaspoons salt 2 cups graham flour 4 cups whole wheat meal ½ cup molasses Buttermilk.
Into a mixing pan sift the flour, soda and salt. Add the graham flour and meal.
Sweeten with molasses and mix to a very stiff batter with buttermilk. Bake 1½ hours in moderate oven. Makes quite a large loaf. If preferred, rolled oats may be substituted in lieu of graham flour and sugar in place of molasses.
Note-In making whole wheat bread, it is preferable to make a sponge at first.
Avoid too stiff a dough, as it produces a tasteless loaf. Many housewives use a bread mixer, and do not knead at all.
Avoid Stiff Doughs with FIVE ROSES Flour CHILLING HOW TO MAKE DAINTY SANDWICHES (FOR VARIOUS BREAD RECIPES, SEE GENERAL INDEX) Specially prepared for Five Roses Cook Book ANDWICHES are almost perfect food. They are made from bread, which is the great life-sustainer, and the filling supplies in tempting, digestible form the only food essential which bread lacks-fat. Wishing to give your sandwiches the utmost food value, you should use Five Roses flour for bread. Made from the purest Manitoba wheat expertly ground, your bread necessarily possesses the energy-building and muscle-making constituents to be found at their best in this flour.
Besides being the picnic stand-by, sandwiches are deservedly popular in many emergencies, such as informal luncheons, or "muncheons," as a witty woman once called them.
Those whose folks are fond of bread will welcome the following sandwich suggestions.
A molasses-sweetened soda bread built on three different wheat grinds. The original gives no quantity for the buttermilk and no pan size, so both need judgment before you start.
- Buttermilk quantityUnmeasured in the original. Expect somewhere around 3 to 4 cups for eight cups of flour to reach the "very stiff batter" described — thick and barely spoonable rather than a kneadable dough. Add it gradually; whole wheat and graham keep absorbing liquid for a minute or two after mixing.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" was generally taken to mean roughly 350-375F. At the lower end 1½ hours is about right for one very large loaf; check the centre for 200-205F on an instant-read thermometer rather than trusting the clock.
- Pan size"Quite a large loaf" is an understatement — this is close to five pounds of batter. Two standard 9x5-inch loaf pans handle it comfortably and bake more evenly than one oversized pan; two loaves will be done nearer 55-65 minutes.
- Graham flour and whole wheat mealThe two terms overlapped considerably in period usage, but graham flour is usually described as whole wheat with the bran left coarse rather than pulverised, and "whole wheat meal" as a coarser grind again. Ordinary supermarket whole wheat flour substitutes for both, though the loaf loses some of its nubbly texture. Stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest match.
- Five Roses flourA hard Manitoba spring-wheat flour, higher in protein than most modern all-purpose. Bread flour is the closer equivalent for the 2 cups of white flour called for.
- Soda and acidTwo teaspoons of soda for eight cups of flour is modest leavening by current standards, and the loaf is meant to be dense and close-grained. The buttermilk is doing the work — it must be genuine cultured buttermilk or soured milk, since sweet milk gives the soda nothing to react with and leaves a soapy taste.
- Work quicklyThe rise begins the moment soda meets buttermilk. Mix only until no dry flour remains, get it into the pans and into a preheated oven; batter left standing on the counter goes flat.
- The note about spongesThe paragraph beginning "In making whole wheat bread" refers to yeast-raised whole wheat loaves generally, not to this soda recipe, which has no sponge stage and needs no kneading. The sandwich essay that follows is page filler from the book, unrelated to the bread.
- Substitutions offeredRolled oats in place of the graham flour make a softer, moister crumb and soak up rather more liquid. Sugar in place of the ½ cup molasses gives a paler loaf and removes the slight acidity molasses contributes to the soda reaction.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households in the early twentieth century — a promotional cookbook whose real subject, on every page, is the flour itself, milled from hard Manitoba spring wheat. This loaf is a plain soda bread at heart, the kind of quick, yeastless loaf that suited a household without a reliably warm rising spot. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that bran and germ should not be sifted out of bread; by 1900 the term had detached from his movement and simply meant coarse whole wheat on a grocer's shelf. The molasses is characteristic of Canadian and New England baking of the period, and carried the additional advantage, in a soda-leavened bread, of supplying acidity of its own.