Graham Bread
2 cups scalded milk 2 tablespoons brown sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup luke warm water 2 cups graham flour 2 cups Gold Medal flour Put the sugar into mixing bowl and add scalded milk. When luke warm add the dissolved yeast; make a batter with the flour and meal, beating vigorously. Let it rise until spongy; add the salt and more meal gradually until it is as thick as can be worked with a stiff knife. Place in greased pans, cover and let rise. In baking it should be set in a quick oven, the heat reduced in ten minutes. This rule is good baked as muffins.
A batter-style yeast bread that never gets kneaded, so the whole outcome rests on beating it hard and knowing when to stop adding flour. A few of the terms are loose enough to need translation.
- "Meal" means the graham flourThe ingredient list gives graham and white flour, then the method refers to "flour and meal." Treat the graham flour as the meal: build the first batter with roughly half of each flour, then work in more graham as it thickens.
- Yeast cakeOne cake of compressed yeast is about 0.6 oz. Substitute 2 1/4 teaspoons (one envelope) of active dry yeast, still dissolved in the quarter cup of lukewarm water.
- Graham flourCoarse-ground whole wheat, milled with the bran and germ left in and unsifted. Modern stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest match; ordinary fine whole wheat works but gives a softer, less nubbly crumb.
- Scalding the milkOriginal purpose was to kill the enzymes and bacteria in raw milk. With pasteurized milk it is optional, though heating to about 180F and cooling still improves the crumb. Do not add the yeast until the milk is genuinely lukewarm, under 110F.
- Oven temperatures"Quick oven" in books of this period is usually taken as roughly 400-425F. Set the loaves in at that heat, then reduce after ten minutes as the recipe directs; it does not say to what, but around 350F suits a whole-grain loaf. The reduction guards against the top darkening before the center sets.
- Consistency, not kneading"As thick as can be worked with a stiff knife" is a heavy batter, not a dough you can handle. Stop adding graham while it still clings to the spoon; a stiffened dough here bakes dense and dry.
- Doneness and yieldThe recipe says "pans," so the batter may have been divided: expect one large 9x5-inch loaf or two smaller ones, or about a dozen muffins. Bake roughly 40-50 minutes for a large loaf, 20-25 for muffins, to an internal temperature of 195-200F.
- Salt timingSalt goes in after the sponge has risen, which is deliberate: undiluted salt slows yeast. Keep that order rather than mixing it in at the start.
Graham flour and graham bread take their name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that white flour stripped bread of what the body needed and campaigned for coarse, unsifted home-baked loaves. By the time this book appeared, the moral crusade had faded into an ordinary shelf item: graham flour was simply what you bought when you wanted brown bread, and graham crackers carried the name into the twentieth century with almost no trace of its origin. Its presence in a cookbook that names Gold Medal flour is worth noticing, since the recipe splits the flour half and half between graham and the branded white flour.