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Graham Nut Bread
3 C graham flour. 1 1/2 C white flour. 1 t baking powder. 1 C sugar. 15c chopped nut meats 1 C raisins 1 pt. buttermilk or sour milk 1 level t soda Mix all together and let stand in loaf pan 20 minutes before baking. Bake about 40 minutes. 2 C white flour 2 C graham flour 2 C bran flour
A community-cookbook quick bread written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what she was doing: the ingredient list runs on past the method, and one of the quantities is given in money rather than volume. Everything is workable once the amounts are pinned down.
- 15c chopped nut meatsThe printed page reads 15c: fifteen cents' worth of shelled nuts at the grocer, not a volume measure. At the prices of the day, that much walnuts or hickory nuts comes to roughly a cup, which is a good place to start.
- Read the flours firstThe three flours are printed after the mixing instruction but belong at the start: 2 cups white, 2 cups graham, 2 cups bran, six cups of dry in all. Combine them with the soda before the buttermilk goes in, or the soda will streak.
- Graham and bran flourGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat, stone-ground with the germ left in; ordinary whole-wheat flour is the closest substitute. "Bran flour" in books of this kind seems generally to have meant a bran-heavy meal rather than pure miller's bran, so a mix of wheat bran and whole-wheat will probably behave more like the original than straight bran.
- A pint of buttermilkTwo cups. With six cups of flour this makes a very stiff batter, closer to a dough; add a little more buttermilk if it will not fall from the spoon.
- The soda is shortOne level teaspoon for a pint of sour milk and six cups of flour will give a dense, close loaf. Two teaspoons is the usual modern proportion, and a half teaspoon of salt, which the recipe omits entirely, is worth adding.
- No sweetenerThe raisins are the only sugar here. Period nut breads of this type often carried a half cup of molasses or brown sugar; without it the loaf is frankly plain, which may well have been the point.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A loaf of this size and density belongs in a moderate oven, 350F, for the 40 minutes stated, though a full six-cup loaf often wants closer to an hour. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- The twenty-minute restLetting the batter stand in the pan lets the bran hydrate and the soda begin working on the sour milk. Do not extend it much past twenty minutes or the lift will be spent before the loaf reaches the oven.
- YieldA large loaf; six cups of flour will probably overfill a single 9x5 pan, so two smaller ones are safer and bake more evenly. It slices best the day after.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached coarse unsifted wheat against the fashionable white loaf; by the time this book was compiled his name had detached from his crusade and simply meant whole-meal flour on a grocer's shelf. The recipe is characteristic of church and ladies'-aid cookbooks of the period in several respects: sour milk and soda instead of yeast; bran and graham for economy and for the bowel-regulating virtues that were widely credited to them; and a quantity given as fifteen cents' worth, which tells you the contributor shopped from a price list rather than a scale. Nut breads generally were a fixture of American church suppers and afternoon teas in the first decades of the twentieth century, sliced thin and sometimes spread with cream cheese.