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Graham Bread
1 1/2 cups graham flour 3 teaspoons sugar 1 1/2 cups water 1 1/2 cups white flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 3 tablespoons molasses Little salt Bake one hour. This recipe makes one loaf.
A plain quick loaf from the wartime meatless era, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what to do with it. The list gives no oven temperature, no pan and no mixing method, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hinge: mix it barelyThis is a chemically leavened batter bread, not a kneaded dough. Whisk the dry ingredients together, stir the molasses into the water, then combine with as few strokes as it takes to wet the flour. Overworking gives a tough loaf with tunnels.
- Graham flourNamed for Sylvester Graham, it is whole wheat flour with the bran and germ coarsely ground back in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; regular fine whole wheat flour works but gives a smoother crumb.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. An hour's bake for a single loaf points to a moderate oven, 350F. Check at 45 minutes; it is done when a skewer comes out clean and the centre reads about 200F.
- PanOne loaf of this size suits an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch pan, greased. The batter will be thick and pourable rather than shapeable, so it needs the support of a tin.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than what the book intended. With three teaspoons of sugar alongside it, the loaf is only faintly sweet.
- Salt"Little salt" in a loaf this size means roughly 3/4 teaspoon. Whole wheat batters taste flat without it.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for three cups of flour is in line with modern practice. Get the loaf into the oven promptly once mixed, since the first rise begins on contact with the liquid.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf, about ten slices. Quick breads of this type slice cleanly only once fully cool, and they stale fast; a day-old loaf is better toasted.
Graham flour and graham bread carry the name of Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that finely bolted white flour had been stripped of what the body needed and that bread should be made at home from coarsely ground whole wheat. He objected to chemical leavening and to most enrichment, so a loaf raised with baking powder and sweetened with molasses would not have met his standard, though by the early twentieth century "graham" was widely used to mean little more than whole wheat. Whole grains and molasses were staples of the meatless and economy cookbooks of the period, and books of this kind were often published around the food conservation campaigns of the First World War, when households were asked to spare wheat flour and sugar. Quick breads also saved fuel and time against a yeast loaf, which may be why the recipe is written so tersely.