Gluten Bread
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 cup milk, acalded and cooled 1 cup lukewarm water 1 tablespoonful sugar 1 tablespoonful lard or butter, melted 3 cups gluten flour 1 teaspoonful salt GLUTEN Bread is particularly desirable for use in the case of persons suffering from diabetes and other diseases where starch must be eliminated from the diet. Gluten is a body-builder, and is to wheat what lean is to meat--the big food value.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm liquid. Add lard or butter, then flour gradually, and salt. Knead thoroughly until smooth and elastic, or "throw and roll" as shown on this page. Place in well-greased bowl. Cover and set aside in a warm place, free from draught, to rise until light, which should be in about two hours.
Mould into loaves, place in greased pans, filling them half full. Cover, let rise again, and when double in bulk, which should be in about one hour, bake in moderate oven for forty-five minutes.
This will make two one-pound loaves.
IMPORTANT:-- For diet, double the amount of water and omit milk, shortening and sugar.
A small, lean wheat loaf made from gluten flour, which the booklet presents as a food for diabetics. The bread itself is straightforward. The medical claim attached to it is not, and it is the first thing a modern reader needs to know about this page.
- Gluten flour is not what the name now suggestsTwo very different products answer to similar names today. Vital wheat gluten is a near-pure protein powder; three cups of it against two cups of liquid would give something closer to rubber than to bread. High-gluten or strong bread flour is ordinary wheat flour with a high protein content, around thirteen to fourteen percent, and that is the nearer match for what the booklet means. The period product was wheat flour with much of its starch washed out and sold as a specialty item. It has no exact equivalent on a supermarket shelf.
- Judge the dough by feelThree cups of flour to two cups of liquid is slack for wheat. The original flour drank more water than modern bread flour does, so add flour during kneading until the dough turns smooth and elastic rather than trusting the ratio as printed.
- “Gluten is a body-builder”The booklet’s analogy, that gluten is to wheat what lean is to meat, is a nutrition argument of its moment. Wheat protein is real protein, but it is low in lysine, which makes it a poorer protein source than the comparison implies. Read the line as advertising copy rather than as information.
- The diet variant is a different loafThe note at the end doubles the water and drops the milk, the shortening and the sugar, leaving flour, water, yeast and salt. Without sugar the yeast is slower off the mark and the crust stays pale; without fat the crumb is drier and the loaf goes stale inside a day.
- Moderate oven, forty-five minutesThis is one of the few recipes in the book that names both a time and an oven speed. A moderate oven of the period runs about 350°F to 375°F. The pans are filled only half full, so these are modest loaves, and three quarters of an hour suits them.
Before insulin, diabetes was treated with diet alone, and that meant cutting starch as far as a patient could stand. A whole class of commercial foods grew up around the practice: gluten flour, gluten biscuits, bran rusks and almond breads, sold through pharmacies and by mail as foods for the diabetic, with a steady trade in them continuing long after the medicine changed. Insulin was isolated in Toronto in 1921 and given to a patient that following January, which in time turned a loaf like this from a treatment into a specialty item. The page is worth reading as a record of how confidently a food manufacturer could make a medical claim, and of how little stood in the way of one.