Bread: Graham
Graham Bread. ¼ quart Graham flour, 1 quart white flour, 1 yeast cake, 1½ teaspoonfuls salt, 1 cupful brown sugar, 1 quart milk.
BREAD Scald the milk and pour it over the sugar and salt; when lukewarm, stir in the flour and the yeast, which has been dissolved in warm water. Beat hard and let it rise in the pan till spongy. This is a dough which is not stiff enough to knead; it simply requires a thorough stirring and beating. Put it into greased pans, raise, and bake in an oven which is hot at first, but cool during the later part of the baking process. This dough may be used to drop into greased gem pans and bake as muffins.
Rye Bread. 2 quarts rye flour, 1 quart wheat flour, 1 yeast cake, 3 pints warm water, 2 teaspoonfuls salt, 3 tablespoonfuls sugar.
Sift the flour with the sugar and salt, stir in the warm water and dissolved yeast. When thoroughly mixed, begin to work it with your hands; it will be sticky, but the dough must be kept very soft. When thoroughly beaten, pour it into wellbuttered pans and set it in a warm place. Let it rise to twice its bulk and bake an hour in an oven which is a little slower than for white bread.
Rub the crust over with butter to soften it as soon as it is taken from the oven. • Cornmeal Bread. 2 cupfuls flour, cupful cornmeal, 2 cupfuls milk, 2 cupfuls water, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 yeast cake.
Put the milk and water in a double boiler, and let it get scalding hot; then stir in the cornmeal and allow it to cook slowly for half an hour. Pour it into a bread raiser and when lukewarm add the salt and yeast. Gradually beat in the flour.
Three batter breads printed as a run, all built on the same principle: a dough too soft to knead, beaten hard instead. The proportions are given in dry quarts, which is where most of the translation work lies.
- The hinge: beat, do not kneadThese are batter breads. The gluten is developed by vigorous stirring rather than kneading, so beat until the mass pulls away from the spoon in sheets. Adding flour to make it kneadable produces a heavy, dry loaf.
- Quarts of flourPeriod cookbooks reckoned a quart of flour as 4 cups, so the Graham loaf is about 4 cups whole-wheat and 4 cups white, and the rye about 8 cups rye to 4 cups wheat. Rye flour of the period was often coarser than modern; add the liquid gradually and stop while the batter is still slack.
- Graham flourSylvester Graham's flour is coarse whole-wheat, milled with the bran and germ. Modern stone-ground whole-wheat is the closest match; ordinary roller-milled whole-wheat works but gives a smoother crumb.
- One yeast cakeA compressed yeast cake of the period is roughly equivalent to one packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast. Dissolve dry yeast in a few tablespoons of warm, not hot, water.
- Scalding the milkScalding is generally said to have deactivated enzymes in raw milk that weakened dough. With pasteurized milk it is unnecessary, though heating still helps dissolve the brown sugar and salt. Let it cool to about 110F before the yeast goes in; much hotter than that and the yeast will be killed.
- "Hot at first, but cool during the later part"The book gives no temperatures, only relative heats. A reasonable modern reading is to start at about 425F for the first 10-15 minutes to set the crust and drive the rise, then drop to about 350F for the remaining 30-40 minutes. The rye's "a little slower than for white bread" suggests a steady 350F for its full hour.
- Gem pansGem pans are heavy cast-iron muffin tins. A standard 12-cup muffin tin does the same job; grease it well and bake in a hot oven, around 400F for about 20 minutes.
- The cornmeal loaf is unfinishedThe quantity of cornmeal is printed as "cupful" with no number, and the text stops after the flour is beaten in, giving no rising or baking direction. Read 1 cup of cornmeal and finish it as the Graham loaf: rise until doubled, pan, rise again, bake.
- YieldThe Graham batch fills about two standard 9x5-inch loaf pans; the rye, with half again as much flour and liquid, will want three. Butter the rye crust the moment it leaves the oven, as directed, or it will set hard.
Graham flour and Graham bread carry the name of Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that white flour stripped of bran was both unwholesome and morally slack. His followers milled wheat coarse and whole, and by the end of the century "Graham" had become a generic grocery term rather than a sectarian one, which is how it turns up here in a general household compendium beside rye and cornmeal loaves. All three are batter breads, the kind of baking that made sense when yeast came as a perishable cake and a cook was willing to beat a slack dough by hand rather than fight a stiff one. Rye and cornmeal loaves are often said to reflect straightforward economy, both flours being generally reckoned cheaper than wheat, and stretching them with a quart of white flour kept the loaf from turning dense, since neither grain rises as readily as wheat on its own.