Gluten Bread
1 1/4 pounds gluten prepared as above 2 cakes yeast, dissolved in one tablespoon warm water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup oil 8 ounces bread flour Work well till you have a perfectly smooth dough, then set in a warm place to rise. When risen, work it down. Allow it to rise again, then mold it into a loaf. Set the loaf in a warm place to rise till it is one and one-half times its original size. Then bake it one hour.
This bread, if made from flour which is 10 per cent gluten, will be about 20 per cent gluten bread; if made from flour which is 12 per cent gluten, it will be about 24 per cent gluten. (Bread flour is usually from 10 to 12 per cent gluten.) Ordinary bread is from 8 to 10 per cent gluten. A loaf of bread made according to this recipe would contain about six ounces of starch, five and one-half ounces of gluten, two ounces of fat, and the rest water.
A high-protein loaf built on washed wet gluten rather than ordinary dough, from the era when gluten bread was a dietetic prescription. The original assumes a preceding gluten-washing step and gives no oven temperature, so both need filling in.
- What "gluten prepared as above" meansThis is wet gluten: bread dough kneaded under running water until the starch washes away, leaving a rubbery mass mostly water by weight. Modern vital wheat gluten is the dried equivalent and is not interchangeable by weight; on the recipe's own figures (5 1/2 oz of gluten in the finished loaf, some of it contributed by the 8 oz of flour), 1 1/4 lb of wet gluten works out at only about 4 1/2 to 5 oz of dry powder plus the water it absorbs.
- Yeast cakesTwo cakes means two of the compressed fresh yeast cakes of the period -- commonly around 0.6 oz each, though sizes varied -- equivalent to something in the region of a tablespoon of instant dry yeast today. That is a heavy dose for the amount of flour involved.
- The tablespoon of waterOne tablespoon is only enough to slake the yeast, not to hydrate the dough. The moisture comes from the wet gluten itself. If your gluten is on the dry side the dough will not come smooth, and a little more water will be needed, added by feel rather than by measure.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is stated. A one-hour bake for a single loaf points to a moderate oven, 350 to 375F. Tent with foil if the crust darkens before the hour is out.
- Judging donenessThe crumb will be dense and chewy rather than open. The interior should read 200-210F.
- Working the doughGluten dough resists kneading almost at once and can seize up. Work it in short bursts with rests between, and expect the two risings to be slower and more modest than a white loaf's.
- Not gluten-freeThe name is the reverse of what a modern shopper expects. This is a deliberately gluten-concentrated bread, unsuitable for anyone with celiac disease or wheat allergy.
- YieldOne loaf, close-grained and heavy for its size -- on the recipe's own breakdown, something in the region of a pound and a half. It slices best fully cooled.
Gluten bread belongs to the long chapter of nineteenth-century diabetic dietetics, when physicians had no insulin and could only restrict starch. By the 1890s commercial "gluten flours" of varying honesty were sold on both sides of the Atlantic, and analysts repeatedly found them to be little more than ordinary flour. That is probably why this entry ends with arithmetic rather than a serving suggestion: the author is showing the reader how to calculate what fraction of the loaf is actually protein, and the accompanying breakdown into starch, gluten, fat and water is the language of the health-reform and sanitarium kitchens that produced so much American cookery writing around the turn of the century. Washing starch out of dough is far older than the medical use -- it is the traditional Chinese method for making wheat gluten -- but here it is put to an analytical purpose.