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Whole Wheat Bread
2 cups scalded milk 1 teaspoon salt 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm water 3 cups whole wheat flour 2 cups white flour 1/4 cup molasses 1 tablespoon butter Add the sugar and salt to the milk; when lukewarm add the yeast, butter and flour. Place on a floured board and knead lightly to prevent the dough sticking to the board. Put in a warm place, and let it rise. Form into loaves and let it rise again, then bake. Add the molasses after the first raising.
A straightforward sponge-free straight dough, but the ingredient list and the method disagree with each other in two places. Read both before starting.
- The sugar that isn't thereThe method says to add sugar to the milk, but no sugar appears in the ingredients. The molasses is the sweetener, and the closing line tells you to add it after the first rise. Most bakers will get a better loaf by stirring the molasses into the lukewarm milk with the salt and ignoring the afterthought.
- Adding molasses lateIf you do follow the instruction as written, the dough must be kneaded again to distribute the molasses, which knocks the gas out of the first rise. Expect a longer total time and a slightly denser crumb.
- Yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes came in more than one size; the standard small cake is about 0.6 oz. Substitute one 2 1/4-teaspoon packet of active dry yeast, dissolved in the 1/4 cup of lukewarm water as directed. Instant yeast can go straight into the flour.
- Scalded milkScalding was traditionally done to deal with the enzymes and bacteria in raw milk, which were held to slacken the dough. With pasteurized milk it is optional, but heating to about 180F and cooling to lukewarm may still give a marginally softer crumb. Do not add the yeast until the milk is below about 110F.
- FlourModern whole wheat flour is generally finer than the graham-style meal of the period and may take up more liquid. Hold back some of the white flour and add it only as needed; the dough should be tacky rather than stiff.
- Rising timesNone are given. Figure 1 to 1 1/2 hours for the first rise at room temperature until doubled, and 45 minutes to an hour for the shaped loaves.
- Oven"Then bake" assumes a range the cook knew. Use 375F for 40 to 45 minutes; the loaves should sound hollow and read about 195-200F at the center.
- YieldFive cups of flour and two cups of milk make two loaves in standard 8 1/2 by 4 1/2 inch pans, or one large free-form loaf.
Whole wheat bread was a small moral cause as much as a food in the American cookbooks of this era. Following the mid-19th-century campaigning of Sylvester Graham and, later, the dietary reform wings of the vegetarian and temperance movements, unsifted wheat meal was promoted as more wholesome and more digestible than the fine white flour that roller milling, established from the 1870s and 1880s, had made cheap and universal. A book titled Meatless Cookery sits squarely in that tradition, and its bread chapter would have been read as nutrition advice as well as instruction. The molasses is characteristic: it sweetens, darkens the crumb, and masks the slight bitterness of bran, and it was the cheap sweetener of the American pantry long after granulated sugar became affordable.