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Graham Breakfast Rolls
3/4 cup unsifted Graham flour 1 1/4 cups bread flour 3/4 teaspoons salt 3 tablespoons butter substitute 1/2 cup milk (scant) Mix the two kinds of flour and the salt. Rub the butter substitute into the flour with the hands. Stir in the milk, and work to a dough. Knead well till the dough is smooth. This dough should be stiff. With the palms of the hands roll the dough over and over on the bread board until a long roll about three-fourths inch in diameter is formed. Cut the roll into two-inch pieces, prick with a fork, and place on a baking pan far enough apart so that they will not touch each other when baking. When done, allow them to cool on the pan on which they were baked.
A stiff, unleavened dough closer to a hard breakfast biscuit or cracker than to a soft dinner roll. The absence of yeast or baking powder is deliberate, and the finished pieces are meant to be crisp and dry.
- Expect a cracker, not a rollThere is no leavening of any kind, and the liquid is scant. These bake up dense and crisp, in the tradition of the hard breakfast biscuit eaten with butter or coffee. Do not add baking powder in the hope of lightening them; the dough is not built for it.
- OvenNo temperature or time is stated. A dough of this size and dryness suits a moderate oven, 350-375F, for roughly 20-25 minutes, until firm, dry through and lightly coloured. They colour slowly because there is no sugar.
- Butter substituteAt the time this meant margarine, oleomargarine or a vegetable shortening bought in place of scarce or costly butter. Any solid fat works: shortening gives the driest, most cracker-like crumb, butter the best flavour.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour ground with the bran and germ left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Stone-ground whole wheat is the closest modern equivalent. 'Unsifted' here is a measuring instruction: the flour is scooped as it comes rather than sifted before measuring, which gives a heavier cupful.
- Rubbing inWork the fat into the flour until it disappears into a sandy meal before any milk goes in. Warm hands soften the fat too quickly; work briskly, or use a pastry blender.
- The scant half cupAdd the milk gradually. Whole-wheat flours vary in thirst, and the dough is supposed to be genuinely stiff, just barely holding together, rather than tacky.
- ShapingA three-quarter-inch rope cut into two-inch lengths gives short stubby pieces. Pricking with a fork is not decoration; it stops them puffing and helps them dry out evenly.
- Yield and keepingNo yield is stated; the quantity of dough rolled to three-quarters of an inch and cut at two inches works out nearer two dozen pieces than one. Cooling on the hot pan, as directed, drives off the last of the moisture. Once fully cold they keep well in a tin, and stale ones revive in a low oven.
Graham flour carries the name of Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose 1830s campaign against refined white flour made coarse unbolted wheat a badge of wholesome living in America. By the time cookery manuals of this sort were being written, Graham flour had long outlived his more eccentric doctrines and simply meant whole-wheat meal sold at any grocer, valued for what the period called its "bulk" and its supposed benefit to digestion. The call for a butter substitute rather than butter places the recipe in the era when margarine and vegetable shortenings had become respectable household economies, and the hard, dry, unleavened breakfast roll fits the same temperate outlook: filling, plain, keeping well in a tin, and asking nothing of the cook but a strong pair of hands.