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Graham Hurry-Ups
1 cup white flour 1 cup graham flour 2 tablespoons melted butter 7/8 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons baking powder Sift the salt, graham flour, white flour and baking powder together. Return the bran, which is removed by the sifting, to the flour, looking over it carefully to remove any foreign substances. Rub the butter into the flour, pour the milk into the flour mixture and mix all together. Drop by dessertspoonfuls on an oiled pan, and bake in a hot oven about twelve minutes.
A drop biscuit built on half graham flour, meant to be mixed and baked in the time it takes the oven to hold temperature. Two small things in the text need sorting out before you start.
- Melted butter, then "rub in"The ingredient list says melted butter while the method says to rub it into the flour, which is what you would do with cold fat. Either works: rubbing in cold butter gives a slightly flakier crumb, while stirring melted butter through the dry mix (or into the milk) is faster and closer to the spirit of a hurry-up.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat, bran and germ included. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; standard whole wheat flour works but gives a finer, less nubbly biscuit.
- Sifting the bran backThe coarse bran in graham flour will not pass through a sieve, so the instruction is to tip the retained bran back into the bowl rather than discard it. If you are not sifting at all, whisk the dry ingredients thoroughly instead.
- 7/8 cup milkThree-quarters cup plus two tablespoons. The dough should be soft enough to drop from a spoon but not pour; add a further tablespoon if the whole wheat drinks it up.
- A hot oven425 to 450F. Twelve minutes is right for spoon-sized biscuits at that heat; they are done when the tops are set and lightly browned and the bottoms sound hollow.
- DessertspoonfulsA dessertspoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly two teaspoons. Yield will depend on how generously you heap the spoon; expect somewhere between a dozen larger biscuits (add a minute or two) and a considerably greater number of small ones.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is generous by current standards; period powders were often single-acting, though double-acting types were also on the market. Three teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives plenty of lift, and to some palates less of a metallic edge.
- ServingBest straight from the pan; the bran makes them dry out faster than a white flour biscuit. Reheat briefly rather than keeping them a second day.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer whose 1830s campaign for coarse unsifted wheat, cold water and a fleshless diet made whole-meal bread a moral cause as much as a culinary one. By the time meatless cookbooks were being written in quantity around the turn of the century, the reforming edge had worn down into a plain assumption that bran was good for you, and graham flour had a settled place on the pantry shelf next to white. The half-and-half proportion here reads as a sensible compromise: enough graham for the flavour and the fibre, enough white flour to keep a quick biscuit tender. "Hurry-up" seems to have signalled a loaf raised with baking powder rather than yeast, and the appeal is unchanged: bread on the table in a quarter of an hour without waiting for a dough to rise.