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Quick Graham Bread
2 cups graham flour. 1 cup white flour. 1-3 cup sugar. 1 teaspoon salt. 4 level teaspoons baking powder. 1 1/2 cups milk.
Make into batter with care, sifting powder with flour several times, 1 scant cup chopped nuts and one-half cup raisins. Put into well buttered loaf pans and bake.
Add 2 eggs well beaten, 1 large spoon shortening leaving out nuts and raisins and bake in muffin rings.
A plain quick bread of the wartime-thrift school: no eggs, no creaming, one bowl. The text runs two versions together, and reading it correctly is most of the work.
- Read the last sentence as a variationThe recipe as written makes an eggless loaf. The final sentence is an alternative — add 2 beaten eggs and a large spoonful of shortening, omit the nuts and raisins, and bake as muffins. Do not add the eggs and fat to the loaf and then also add them again.
- "1-3 cup sugar"A typesetter's rendering of one-third cup.
- Graham flourCoarse-ground whole wheat with the bran and germ left in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest match; regular whole wheat works but gives a finer crumb. Graham flour absorbs liquid slowly, so let the batter stand five minutes before it goes in the pan.
- "A large spoon shortening"A tablespoon, generously measured. In this period that meant lard or a hydrogenated vegetable shortening; melted butter or oil behaves much the same way here.
- SiftingThe instruction to sift the baking powder with the flour several times is not decoration. Whole-grain flour does not blend readily, and four teaspoons of powder distributed unevenly will give a loaf with tunnels and a bitter patch. Whisking the dry ingredients hard for thirty seconds does the same job; return any bran left in the sieve to the bowl.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given, as was usual in recipes of this date, when many home cooks had no reliable oven gauge. Bake the loaf at about 350F for 45 to 55 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean; muffins at about 400F for 18 to 20 minutes.
- Mixing"Make into batter with care" is best read as stir only until the flour disappears. This is a chemically leavened bread, and heavy beating develops gluten that can make it tough and domed.
- Muffin ringsMetal rings set on a greased baking sheet or griddle, one common alternative to a muffin tin. An ordinary twelve-cup tin will serve as the modern equivalent.
- YieldRoughly one 8 1/2 by 4 1/2 inch loaf (the original says "pans," so the batter may have been divided between smaller tins), or about a dozen muffins. The loaf slices better the day after baking; the crumb is dense and slightly damp when warm.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer who spent the 1830s arguing that unsifted wheat meal was morally and physically superior to the white flour of commercial bakers. His name outlived his theories, attaching itself to a flour and a cracker. Graham flour also had a second and more practical appeal in the years around the First World War: wheat conservation. Household cooks were urged to stretch white flour with whole grains, and a two-to-one graham-to-white quick bread that needs no yeast, no eggs and barely any fat is the sort of thing that period produced in quantity — batter breads leavened with baking powder, mixed in one bowl, baked the same hour they were started.