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Entire Wheat Bread
2 cups scalded milk 1/8 cup sugar, or ½ cup molasses 1/4 yeast cake + cup lukewarm water 1½ teaspoons salt 5 cups sifted entire wheat Mix milk, sugar or molasses, and salt. When lukewarm add dissolved yeast and flour. Beat well, let rise until double its bulk, beat, let rise in buttered bread pans until double its bulk, and bake one hour in moderately hot oven, or bake in gem pans thirty minutes. 2 cups scalded milk 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon sugar 3 cups flour
A plain straight-dough loaf of the sort that filled American bread chapters around 1900, before whole-wheat baking acquired any special virtue. It is worked as a batter-stiff dough rather than a kneaded one, which is why it is beaten rather than turned out.
- The hinge: beat, do not kneadThe dough is beaten before the first rise and again after it, never kneaded. Entire wheat flour has bran that cuts developing gluten, so the method relies on a slack, well-beaten dough; the crumb will be close and moist rather than open.
- "Moderately hot oven"Read this as 375-400F. An hour at that heat suits a full loaf pan; take it to an internal temperature of about 200F if you want certainty.
- Gem pansGem pans are cast-iron muffin pans, usually with deeper, straighter cups than a modern tin. Ordinary muffin tins work; thirty minutes at the same heat is right, and they will brown faster than a loaf.
- Entire wheat flour"Entire wheat" is whole-wheat flour, and it was typically finer and lower in bran than most bread-flour-grade whole wheat sold now. Five cups is roughly 1 lb 6 oz; expect to adjust slightly, as whole wheat absorbs liquid unevenly.
- Yeast cakeA compressed yeast cake is commonly reckoned at about 0.6 oz, usually taken as equivalent to roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast, though period cakes varied in size and strength. Dissolve it in the lukewarm water and wait until the milk has cooled to blood heat before combining, or the heat will kill it.
- Scalding the milkScalding was originally done to check souring and to deactivate enzymes in raw milk. With pasteurised milk it is optional, though heating and cooling still gives a slightly softer crumb.
- Molasses versionThe molasses alternative gives a darker, faintly sweet loaf of the kind often sold as graham bread.
- YieldThe original says 'bread pans', plural: enough dough for one large loaf or two smaller ones, or a batch of gems.
Whole-wheat and graham breads entered American cookbooks through the nineteenth-century health-reform movement, particularly the followers of Sylvester Graham, who argued that bolted white flour stripped the wheat of what made it nourishing. By the time Lowney's book appeared, the argument had cooled into ordinary practice: whole-wheat bread was simply one of several loaves a household made, sitting in the bread chapter beside white bread, rolls and rye. The term "entire wheat" was the trade name of the day for flour milled from the whole kernel, and its use here rather than "graham" suggests the finer commercial grind then coming onto the market. The molasses option is a survival of an older sweetening habit in New England baking, where molasses is often said to have been cheaper and more familiar than refined sugar well into the century.