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Soft Graham Bread
1 1/2 quarts graham flour 1 pint white flour 2 teaspoons salt 1 cake compressed yeast 3 cups warm water 1/2 cup molasses or 1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/4 cup honey 1 tablespoon butter Mix the ingredients in order given, adding sufficient warm water to make a soft dough. Beat the dough thoroughly and set in a warm place for about three hours, until it is light. Then beat again, and turn it into bread pans, filling them half full. When the bread is risen to about three-fourths the height of the pan, bake in a moderate oven from 45 minutes to an hour. Graham bread should not rise as much as white bread.
This is a beaten batter-style loaf rather than a kneaded one, which is what the "soft" in the title means. The measurements are by volume in old vessels, so convert before you start.
- Flour quantities1 1/2 quarts graham flour is 6 cups; 1 pint white flour is 2 cups. Graham flour was measured unsifted and scooped, so expect roughly 26-28 oz graham and 9 oz white by weight.
- Graham flourCoarse, unbolted whole wheat with the bran and germ left in and not sifted out. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; standard whole wheat flour works but gives a finer crumb than intended.
- YeastA cake of compressed yeast was commonly the small 0.6 oz size, though cakes were sold in other weights; the usual modern substitute is 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast. Dissolve cake or active dry yeast in part of the warm water first; instant can go in with the flour.
- WaterThree cups is the starting point, not the total. With 8 cups of flour you will likely need 3 1/2 cups or a little more to reach a dough soft enough to beat with a spoon rather than knead.
- The hingeDo not let it over-rise. The last line is the whole instruction: graham bread should not rise as much as white bread. Bran interferes with gluten development, so a loaf pushed to double is liable to collapse in the oven. Bake at three-quarters the pan height as directed.
- Beating, not kneading"Beat the dough thoroughly" means develop it with a heavy spoon or a mixer paddle. It should be sticky and slack; resist adding flour to make it handleable.
- Oven'Moderate' is generally taken to mean somewhere around 350F, though the book gives no temperatures. At the low end of the stated range, 45 minutes, check the centre: a finished whole-grain loaf reads 200-205F internally and sounds hollow when tapped out of the pan.
- YieldEnough to fill two to three standard loaf pans half full as directed; the recipe specifies no pan size, so judge by the half-full mark rather than a pan count. Molasses gives a darker, faintly bitter loaf; the brown sugar and honey option is milder and sweeter.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American preacher and diet reformer of the 1830s who argued that white bread stripped of bran was both unwholesome and a symptom of overrefined living. By the time this book was printed the term had detached from his followers and simply meant coarse unsifted wheat meal, sold by any grocer. Molasses and graham flour were a common pairing in brown breads of the period; the molasses would also have fed the yeast and offset some of the bitterness of the bran.