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Quick Brown Bread
1 egg. 1 1/2 C Graham flour. 1 C sour milk 1/2 C molasses ½ C Graham flour 1/2 C white flour 1 t (heaping) soda 12 t salt 1/2 C raisins Mrs. M. R. Miller Bake for one hour in a very slow oven.
A plain quick loaf of the sour-milk-and-molasses type, leavened entirely with soda. The batter is thin and pours rather than kneads, so the pan and the low oven are doing most of the work.
- The salt is a typo"12 t salt" is almost certainly 1/2 t, a broken fraction from the original typesetting. Use half a teaspoon; twelve teaspoons would be roughly two ounces of salt in a loaf holding about two cups of flour.
- Very slow ovenRead that as 250-300F. An hour at that heat is right for a single small loaf; a hotter oven will set and darken the molasses crust long before the wet centre is done.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and clabbered, and it is the acid that fires the soda. Buttermilk is the direct modern stand-in. A cup of ordinary milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice will also work, though it stays thinner.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, milled with the bran and germ left in. Stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing on a supermarket shelf; standard whole-wheat flour is finer but acceptable.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than what the period called for and will fight the small quantity of sugar in the raisins.
- Heaping teaspoon of sodaReckon that at roughly one and a half to two level teaspoons; it has both the soured milk and the acidity of the molasses to neutralise. Mix and get it into the oven promptly, because the rise begins the moment the two meet.
- Pan and yieldNo pan is specified. The batter fits a small loaf tin of about 8 by 4 inches, or a coffee tin if you want a tall round shape. One loaf, eight to ten slices.
- Testing itA dark molasses crumb hides underbaking. Judge by a skewer coming out clean and an internal temperature around 200F rather than by colour.
Sour-milk brown breads like this one belong to a distinctly American line of soda-leavened loaves that spread through home kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, once cheap chemical leavening made a loaf possible in an hour instead of a day. The name "Graham flour" honours Sylvester Graham, the temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued for unbolted whole-grain flour; by the time this recipe was collected the term had long since become an ordinary grocery word rather than a moral position. Calling it "quick" distinguishes it from steamed Boston brown bread, the older cousin made with rye and cornmeal and cooked for hours in a covered mould over water. A compiled community cookbook collected exactly this sort of contribution: a reliable, cheap loaf from a named neighbour, using the soured milk that a household keeping a cow would otherwise have wasted.