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Whole Wheat Bread
Scald one cup of fresh milk, add one heaping teaspoon each of butter, sugar and salt. When butter is melted, add one cup of cold water. When lukewarm, add one cup of warm water in which is dissolved one compressed yeast cake.
Stir in three cups of good white bread flour; beat well, and set to rise, covered, in a warm place. Let rise from one to two hours till the sponge is full of bubbles. Then stir in sufficient whole wheat flour to make a dough that can be handled, and knead twenty minutes, using as little flour (entire wheat), as possible, as too much flour worked in makes heavy, tough bread. Let rise, and when light (from two to three hours in a warm place), mold lightly into loaves, and set to rise in three medium-sized greased bread tins. When light again, bake for about fifty minutes in a moderate oven. Started early in the morning, the baking can be accomplished by noon. If more convenient to set it at night, use only half a yeast cake, and after kneading, leave in a rather cool place, as too much rising will result in sour, worthless bread.-Jane Johnston.
A straightforward sponge-and-dough whole wheat loaf. The quantities work as written; only the yeast and the oven need translating.
- Compressed yeast cakeOne cake was roughly 0.6 oz of fresh cake yeast. Substitute 2¼ teaspoons (one standard packet) of active dry or instant yeast, or half that for the overnight version described at the end.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. Fifty minutes suits the three loaves described here; the loaves are done at an internal temperature of 190-200F and should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.
- Entire wheat flourThe recipe uses "entire wheat" and "whole wheat" interchangeably for the same flour, as against the sifted white bread flour used for the sponge; period usage of the two terms was not wholly consistent, some sources reserving "entire wheat" for flour with the coarsest bran sifted out. Add enough to make a dough that can be handled -- several cups -- keeping it soft and slightly tacky.
- The hingeThe warning about flour is the important line. Whole wheat absorbs liquid slowly, so a dough that feels slack at first will firm up during kneading. Adding flour to chase a dry feel is what produces the heavy, tough loaf the recipe warns against.
- Kneading twenty minutesTwenty minutes is a hand-kneading figure for a bran-heavy dough. In a stand mixer with a dough hook, 8 to 10 minutes on medium-low is equivalent.
- Rising timesOne to two hours for the sponge and two to three for the dough assume a kitchen cooler than most modern ones. At 70-75F both stages will move faster; judge by the dough roughly doubling rather than by the clock.
- Sour breadThe overnight instruction is not fussiness. Over-fermented dough builds acetic and lactic acid, which weakens the gluten and gives a sharp flavour. Halving the yeast and keeping the dough cool slows this.
- Bread tins"medium-sized" is not defined in the recipe; a modern 8½ by 4½ inch tin is a reasonable stand-in. Three of them, with the dough divided evenly between them.
Whole wheat bread appears in American cookbooks of this period as much a matter of health doctrine as of taste. Roller-milled white flour became cheap and widely available in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and a counter-movement — traceable to Sylvester Graham's advocacy of unsifted flour in the 1830s and carried forward by later hygienic and sanitarium cooking — insisted that the bran and germ belonged in the loaf. The sponge method used here, in which a wet white-flour batter is fermented first and the whole wheat worked in afterward, is a practical concession: bran interferes with gluten development, so the yeast is given an easy start on white flour before the heavier flour goes in. The recipe carries a signed attribution to Jane Johnston, and the note about timing the bake to finish by noon reads like household advice rather than instruction.