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Baking-Powder Breads: Graham
If the Graham flour is very coarse, sift it and throw away the bran. Add the salt, pour in the molasses, milk, beaten egg, and the soda dissolved in a little water. If you desire bread that is not very dark or sweet, use 2 tablespoonfuls molasses and 1 teaspoonful sugar. Steam for two and a half-hours in pound baking-powder can. Give it three hours if steamed in a quart pail.
Sunday-Morning Loaf. 2 cupfuls Graham flour, 1 cupful wheat flour, 1 cupful Indian meal, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 cupful molasses, 1½ teaspoonfuls soda, cupful cold water, 1 tablespoonful melted lard, 1 cupful sour milk, 1½ cupfuls sweet milk.
Sift the dry materials together, add the molasses, lard, soda melted in water, and milk. Beat thoroughly; pour into a buttered mold, and steam for three hours. This makes two medium-sized loaves. In New England these are called Sunday-Morning loaves, because they are generally made Saturday night and put in the oven for half an hour next morning to serve with the traditional baked beans. They keep for one or two weeks and may be heated for use at any time.
Steamed Graham Loaf. 3 cupfuls of Graham flour, 1 cupful wheat flour, 1 teaspoonful soda, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 cupful molasses, 2½ cupfuls sour milk. 2 cupfuls sour milk, 1 egg, 3 cupfuls Graham flour, Sift dry ingredients, add molasses and milk, beat well and turn into a buttered mold. Steam three and a half hours. This mixture, cooked in MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK pound baking-powder cans, will make four loaves, which can be reheated when required. Place the can on a frame in a kettle containing boiling water.
Whole-Wheat Muffins. 1 cupful whole-wheat meai, 1 cupful flour, 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful soda, 11 cupfuls sour milk, 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter, 1 egg.
Sift the dry ingredients together, mix with the beaten egg, milk, and butter. Bake in hot gem pans.
Spider Corn Cake. cupful cornmeal, cupful flour, 1 tablespoonful sugar, teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful soda, 1 egg, cupful sour milk, cupful sweet milk.
Sift the dry ingredients together and mix them with the well-beaten egg and milk. Beat thoroughly.
Melt 2 tablespoonfuls butter in an iron spider and pour the mixture into it. Pour cupful sweet milk over the top of the batter and set it very carefully into a hot oven. Bake for twenty minutes.
Rice or Hominy Griddlecakes or Muffins. 1 cupful sour milk, 1 cupful cold rice or fine hominy, teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful soda, 1 egg, 1 teaspoonful melted butter, Flour to make a batter.
Heat the rice or hominy over hot water and moisten gradually with the milk till free from lumps. Add salt and soda, stir in the beaten egg yolk, then the melted butter, then flour to make a soft batter, lastly the white of egg beaten stiff. This is for griddlecakes. For muffins, use flour enough to make a stiff batter.
This page runs several New England quick breads together: a steamed Graham loaf in cans, a Sunday-Morning loaf, whole-wheat muffins, a skillet corn cake, and a batter that uses up leftover rice or hominy. The steamed loaves are the heart of it, and the vessel matters more than anything else.
- The hinge: steaming, not bakingThe batter goes into a buttered mold or can set on a frame in a kettle of boiling water, which is all the book specifies. Standard practice for steamed loaves, though not stated here, is to cover the mold loosely, fill it no more than two-thirds, have the water reach partway up the sides, keep it at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water as it evaporates; the loaf sets by moist heat and will be gummy if the pot runs dry.
- A pound baking-powder canA straight-sided tin that held a pound of baking powder, on the order of 2 cups in capacity. Straight-sided pudding molds or wide-mouth pint jars are the closest modern stand-ins, greased and capped with buttered foil tied down; a 1-lb coffee tin will do but is larger. A quart pail holds appreciably more, which is why the original stretches the time to three hours.
- Sour milk means buttermilkCultured buttermilk is the direct substitute and supplies the acid the soda needs. Fresh milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup also works. Do not use milk that has simply gone off in the refrigerator.
- Graham flour and Indian mealGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour, ground with the bran and germ; ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing on a shelf today. Indian meal is cornmeal, preferably stone-ground yellow. The instruction to sift out coarse bran can be skipped unless the flour is unusually rough.
- Soda dissolved, lard meltedWhere the text says soda "melted" in water it means dissolved in a little cold water. The book adds it late in the mixing (last of all in the first recipe, before the milk in the Sunday-Morning loaf), so the rise is not spent before the mold goes into the kettle. Lard can be replaced measure for measure with melted butter or a neutral oil, with a small loss of tenderness.
- Gem pans and the hot ovenGem pans are heavy cast-iron muffin pans; a standard 12-cup muffin tin works, and preheating it with a little fat in each cup gives the crisp crust intended. The book gives no temperature; a hot oven of the period is conventionally read as roughly 400 to 425F, 15 to 20 minutes for muffins.
- The spider and the milk on topA spider is a cast-iron skillet, originally footed for hearth cooking; use a 9- or 10-inch pan, well heated with the butter in it. The cupful of sweet milk poured over the batter must not be stirred in. The book says only "a hot oven," conventionally about 400 to 425F, for the stated twenty minutes.
- Reheating and yieldThe Sunday-Morning recipe gives two medium loaves; the steamed Graham mixture fills four pound baking-powder cans. The book says only to put the loaf in the oven for half an hour next morning; a moderate oven of around 350F suits. Sliced steamed bread also reheats well wrapped in a damp cloth over steam.
- Uncertain quantitiesSeveral of the shorter lists give a bare "cupful" or "teaspoonful" where a fraction belongs. In the Spider Corn Cake both flours and the milks are bare; in the muffins it is the salt, soda and milk. Half a cup of each meal for the corn cake and half a teaspoon each of salt and soda are plausible fillings, but treat them as a reconstruction rather than the book's own figures.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who campaigned for coarse unsifted wheat meal against the fashionable white loaf; by the end of the century "Graham" had become a plain commercial designation for whole-wheat flour, and Graham bread, gems and crackers were fixtures of American cookbooks. The steamed loaves here belong to the older New England pattern that also produced Boston brown bread: molasses for sweetening, soda and sour milk instead of yeast, and a long spell in a covered mold over boiling water, which suited a household that wanted bread without heating the oven or waiting on a rise. The Sunday-Morning name records the Sabbath routine the book describes plainly enough, the loaf steamed Saturday night to be warmed with the beans in the morning, and the note that these keep a week or two is a fair indication of how densely molasses and whole meal hold moisture.