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About Flour. Graham Bread, Rye-an'-Injun and Boston Brown

In fact, great emphasis has been laid upon the quality and manufacture of bread from early times, when the whitest and finest was called simnel cakes, and was concocted chiefly to please the palate of the rich and high-born as well as the wastel bread, not quite so aristocratic; while the tourle, or twisted loaf, and black bread made from the coarsest portion of the wheat, or from some inferior grain, fell to the share of the poor. Nowadays we have discovered that the coarse fare furnishes more nutriment, and the rich have adopted it and made it popular--Harper's Bazar. Every cure of corpulence must begin with these three maxims or absolute principles: discretion in eating, moderation in sleep, exercise on foot or horseback.

To abstain more or less rigorously from all that is floury and starchy tends to lessen corpulence.

You like bread; then eat brown or rye bread At breakfast, take brown bread as a matter of course, and chocolate rather than coffee. Strong coffee, however, with milk, may be conceded. Eat as little of the crumb of bread as possible.--Gastronomy as a Fine Art. Perfect yeast, quick and strong, and so sweet and tasteless that no harm can result from using it plentifully is the first requirement for making perfect bread and the quality of the flour is next to be taken into account. The flour is too generally made to bear all the blame of poor bakings. A good bread maker with good yeast can make better bread from second rate flour than a second rate workman generally can from the finest. Yet in good hands the finest flour will produce rolls and loaves half as large again for their weight as those made of inferior flour. Shop bakers who have to count their profit by the number of loaves that a barrel of flour can be made to produce, know that several more loaves of the same weight, and of larger size, can be made from fine flour than from coarse, showing that the best takes up most water, and from the bread maker's point of view may be as cheap as the poor flour which costs less money.

The usual tests for flour do not generally amount to much in assisting the buyer, The miller's brand is his trade mark, and most of them try to keep up the quality of their best at an even degree of excellence. The brand is often the best guide.

If two or three samples of flour are placed in the hand side by side, and smoothed with a silver knife, the finest may be known by its greater freedom from bran. Yet when one sample is from red wheat, another from white, the appearances may be deceptive. White wheat does not make the whitest bread, in a general way. A handful of flour pressed in the hand, if good, will retain its shape, while coarse flour falls apart like sand. Yet the best flour newly ground will not answer to this test, and poor flour with age will. Spring wheat flour may be white, but will not, unless in exceptional cases, make rolls and loaves of as good shape as winter wheat flour, they having a tendency to run out of shape, the dough being soft and sticky. It is winter wheat flour that makes the tall round handsome rolls and loaves. Good flour is slow to go through the seive, rolls up in balls and coats the sides. Poor flour passes through like buckwheat or meal. Flour improves with keeping, especially in whiteness. It should have six months age before being used for fine rolls. Bakers sometime buy flour that has become caked in the barrels through long keeping, and mix portions of it with the newer flour to impart whiteness and strength. It often improves the bread to mix two or three brands of flour together, particularly when one is older than the other. Spring wheat flour may be best worked off by having some old winter wheat flour to mix with it. But this is all on the common assumption that good flour means fine, white flour, and the crowning glory of bread-making is to have bread snowy-white and delicate in taste and texture. A very large minority in our hotels, however, make known their preference for various kinds of bread of a coarser sort. Graham flour should be the unbolted meal of wheat, but not only that, the wheat should be good plump grain, such as would make fine flour. Very often the appearance and handling is such that graham flour seems little else than bran and shorts, as if the thinnest wheat had been got rid of in that shape. In other samples the flour is made by taking seconds flour and mixing in an indefinite amount of bran, defrauding the consumer of the finest portion of the flour altogether. The best remedy is to buy such flour only of a reputable miller who makes it a special care to select good wheat-generally white wheat-for the purpose. Another remedy is supplied by the proportions of the following receipts.