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Graham Biscuit
2 quarts unsifted graham. 1 quart flour. 2 ounces lard. 1 egg in the milk, (optional). Salt. 4 teaspoonful's of baking powder. Milk or water to make soft dough.
An hotel party cook and baker who had grown ashamed of himself, once told me that for years he went from one hotel to another, as pastry cooks do, and always finding the people earnestly wished for Boston Brown Bread, he as earnestly protested that it could not be made unless there was a brick oven in which to bake it 8 hours, and as only about one in fifty of American hotels own a brick oven this usually ended the argument.
And yet here and there would be some little house enjoying quite a reputation and a run of custom be cause of its much beloved Boston brown, or it might be only rye-and-injun, hot for breakfast or supper, or for Sunday mornings especially. No matter how, but as he grew wiser and older this pastry cook found the brick oven was by no means an article indispensable, and Boston brown that was a thousand times pronounced all that could be wished, he made by the following described methods.
An ingredient list rather than a method, in the shorthand a working hotel baker would have understood. The narrative that follows the list is the lead-in to the Boston brown bread recipes further on, not part of the biscuit.
- ScaleTwo quarts of graham plus one quart of white flour is roughly 12 cups of flour, near 3 lb, and will make five or six dozen biscuits. Quartering the whole formula gives a household batch.
- Graham flourCoarse, unsifted whole wheat with the bran and germ left in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; standard whole wheat flour works but is milled finer and drinks less liquid.
- Measuring by volumeA quart measure in kitchen use was reckoned as 4 cups, though a true dry quart is somewhat larger. Unsifted graham packs unevenly, so weigh if you can: roughly 2 to 2¼ lb graham to about 1 lb 2 oz white flour.
- Leavening looks shortFour teaspoons of baking powder for 12 cups of flour is well under modern practice, which runs 1 to 1½ teaspoons per cup. Either the figure is a printer's slip or the intended result was a dense, close-grained biscuit; assume the latter unless you raise the powder.
- SaltUnspecified, as usual in trade books. Roughly a teaspoon per quart of flour, so about 3 teaspoons for the full batch.
- LardTwo ounces is about ¼ cup, rubbed into the dry flour before the liquid goes in. Butter or shortening substitutes directly by weight.
- Soft doughThe hinge of the whole thing. Graham absorbs slowly, so add milk until the dough is slack and barely handleable, then let it stand a few minutes before cutting; a stiff graham dough bakes hard.
- OvenNo temperature is given, and in fact no baking direction at all. Biscuits of this type suit a hot oven, around 425–450°F, for 12 to 15 minutes.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and diet reformer whose 1830s campaign against fine white bolted flour urged coarse, unsifted wheat on American households. By the later decades of the century the moral argument had largely faded and graham was simply an ingredient — graham biscuit, graham gems and graham bread served as plain wholesome alternatives. The paragraph attached here, about the itinerant pastry cook who insisted Boston brown bread needed a brick oven and eight hours, is one cook's account as the author reports it, and it does indicate that American hotel pastry cooks moved from house to house.