Graham Bread
The night before baking, make a sponge of white flour, using half new milk and half cold water, with a teacup two thirds full of home-made yeast. In the morning, put four tablespoonfuls of this sponge in a separate dish, adding three tablespoonfuls of molasses, a little milk or water, and stirring in as much Graham flour as you can with a spoon. Then let it rise and mould the same as white bread.
This is a two-stage bread built on a leftover white-flour sponge, and the original assumes you already have both a bowl of overnight sponge and a jug of home-made yeast on hand. The measurements for the Graham dough itself are given by feel rather than weight.
- The hinge: only four tablespoons of spongeThe Graham loaf is leavened entirely by four tablespoonfuls of the overnight white sponge, which is a very small inoculation. Expect a long, slow second rise — several hours in a warm kitchen — rather than the hour or two a modern straight dough takes.
- Home-made yeastThe "teacup two thirds full" is a liquid home-made yeast, most likely a barm or a potato-and-hop ferment, perhaps a third of a cup of active starter, not dry yeast. The recipe gives no quantity for the overnight sponge itself, so a modern substitution — a little instant yeast, milk and water, and enough flour to make a thick batter — has to be scaled by eye.
- New milk"New milk" is fresh, unskimmed milk straight from the cow. Whole milk works; period cookbooks frequently direct that milk be scalded and cooled before use, which denatures the whey proteins that would otherwise slacken the dough.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled from the entire kernel and left unsifted. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; ordinary whole-wheat flour is finer but acceptable. It absorbs more liquid than white flour, so add it gradually.
- Dough consistency"As much Graham flour as you can with a spoon" means stirring flour in to the limit of what a spoon will move — a very stiff batter or soft dough. The recipe then has it moulded like white bread, so it must end up firm enough to handle; add the flour gradually.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake a loaf of this size at 375F for 40 to 50 minutes, until the internal temperature reaches about 200F; molasses browns quickly, so tent the top with foil if it darkens early.
- YieldAs written the quantities are small: enough for one small loaf, so use the smallest loaf pan you have. The remainder of the overnight sponge presumably went into the day's white bread rather than being thrown out.
Graham flour and Graham bread take their name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance and dietary reformer of the 1830s and 40s who preached coarse unsifted wheat meal, home baking and abstention from stimulants; by the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled in 1879 the name had detached from the movement and simply meant whole-wheat. The recipe's structure is more revealing than its politics: it presumes a household that keeps a sponge working overnight for the daily white loaves and treats the brown bread as a small offshoot of that same sponge, sweetened with molasses because molasses was cheap and because it masks the slight bitterness of bran. Recipes of this kind were written for cooks who judged dough by the spoon and the oven by the hand, and who baked several times a week rather than once.