Graham Bread
2 cups milk scalded cup molasses 2 teaspoons salt 1/4 yeast cake 1 cup lukewarm water 2 cups white flour 4 cups graham flour Mix milk, molasses and salt. When lukewarm add dissolved yeast cake, sifted white and graham flour. Beat well.
Let rise until almost double its bulk, beat again, place in buttered bread pans or shape in biscuit, let rise, and bake in an oven which is a little cooler than for white bread, -loaves one and one quarter hours and biscuit thirty minutes.
A plain sponge-free whole wheat loaf from the era when graham flour was a health food. Two things in the text need sorting out before you start: the molasses quantity has dropped out in printing, and the yeast is a fraction of a cake, which means a very long rise.
- The missing molasses measureThe original reads "cup molasses" with no number, apparently a printer's drop. Period graham breads vary, but a quarter to a half cup is common for this quantity of flour; a full cup would give a sweeter, darker loaf and a slower rise.
- The lukewarm waterThe cup of water appears in the ingredient list but never in the method. It is there to dissolve the yeast cake, and it goes into the dough with it. Do not omit it or the dough will be far too stiff.
- Yeast cakeA compressed yeast cake of the day was roughly half to two-thirds of an ounce, so a quarter cake works out at about a scant half teaspoon of instant dry yeast. That is a small amount for six cups of flour, and the first rise will take several hours at room temperature rather than one.
- Graham flourCoarse whole wheat flour milled with the bran and germ returned. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is the closest current equivalent; standard fine whole wheat works but gives a tighter crumb than intended.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no figure, only "a little cooler than for white bread." If you bake white bread at 400-425F, around 375F is a reasonable reading. The lower heat helps keep the molasses-sweetened crust from darkening before the centre sets.
- Baking timesAn hour and a quarter suits a heavy loaf in a large old-fashioned pan. In modern 8x4 pans, check at 45-50 minutes and pull the loaves at an internal temperature of 195-200F. The biscuits, meaning small rolls rather than chemically leavened biscuits, will be done well before thirty minutes at this size.
- Beating, not kneadingThe method says beat well and beat again, and it means it. This is a slack, batter-like dough handled with a spoon rather than kneaded on a board, which is why the crumb is dense and moist rather than open.
- YieldSix cups of flour gives two standard loaves, or about eighteen small rolls.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached that finely bolted white flour had been stripped of what the body needed, and that coarse home-milled wheat, eaten in plain bread, was the remedy. By the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907 graham flour was simply an ordinary grocery item, the wholemeal option on the shelf beside the white. The molasses is characteristic of the American whole-grain loaf of the period, doing two jobs at once: sweetening a flour many found bitter and darkening the crumb. The book itself was written by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer.