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Graham Bread
1 1/2 cups flour 1 1/2 cups graham flour 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon shortening 1 egg 1 cup liquid (1/2 water and 1/2 milk) 2 tablespoons sugar or molasses Mix flour, graham flour, baking powder and salt together; rub in shortening; beat egg and add with sugar or molasses to liquid; stir into dry mixture and beat well; add more milk if necessary to make a drop batter. Put into greased loaf-pan, smooth with knife dipped in cold water. Bake about one hour in moderate oven.
A quick bread rather than a yeasted loaf, built on the same principle as a large muffin batter. The one thing to get right is the consistency: a drop batter, thick enough to hold its shape on a spoon but loose enough to fall from it, not a kneadable dough.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. At an hour, a loaf this size will be well past done in a hotter oven; check from 45 minutes with a skewer in the centre.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, bran and germ included. Modern stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest match; standard whole wheat works but gives a finer, softer crumb.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons is generous even for whole-grain batter. Today's double-acting powders are stronger than some of the period's, and 3 teaspoons is usually enough for 3 cups of flour; more can leave a faintly soapy edge.
- ShorteningHere it means any solid fat: lard or a vegetable shortening of the period would both fit. Butter is fine and gives better flavour; rub it into the dry mix until it disappears.
- Sugar or molassesMolasses makes a darker, moister, distinctly old-fashioned loaf and reacts with the whole wheat's flavour; sugar keeps it plain. Two tablespoons is barely sweet either way, so this is a bread for butter, not a cake.
- Pan and finishThe recipe says only "greased loaf-pan"; this quantity of batter suits roughly an 8x4 or 9x5 tin. Smoothing the top with a wet knife keeps the batter from tearing and gives an even crust; a small ridge down the centre is normal in a chemically leavened loaf.
- Mixing"Beat well" here is not licence to overwork it. Combine until no dry flour remains and stop, or the crumb turns tough and tunnelled.
- YieldOne loaf, about ten to twelve slices. It stales quickly, as quick breads do, and is best the day it is baked or toasted thereafter.
Graham flour and graham bread take their name from Sylvester Graham, the American preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that unsifted whole-wheat flour, home-ground and baked without adulteration, was essential to health and temperance. His followers baked stiff yeasted loaves; by the time this book appeared, the name had detached from the movement and simply meant bread made with coarse whole-wheat flour. The version here shows what happened to it in the age of chemical leavening: a baking-powder batter mixed and baked within the hour, a method Graham did not live to see in general use. Recipes like this one were published by baking-powder manufacturers to demonstrate that their product could stand in for yeast in any loaf a cook cared to make, and the prominence of the brand name in the ingredient list is the whole point of the book.