Graham Rolls
This is for fifty rolls of small size. 2 pounds of graham, not sifted. 1 pounds of white flour. 1 1/2 pints of warm water. 1/2 pint of yeast. 1/2 cup of reboiled molasses. 1 egg-2 whites are better. 1 teaspoonful of salt. Set sponge with the graham at 9 or 10 in the morning, for rolls for supper; at about 1 add all the other ingredients and make it stiff dough. Let rise till 4. Then work the dough by spreading it out on the table, with the knuckles, folding over and pressing again repeatedly. Make into rolls in any of the ways to be hereinafter detailed for white rolls. Grease slightly between each one with a brush dipped in melted lard or butter. Brush over the tops with the same, and set the rolls to rise about 45 minutes. Bake carefully about 15 minutes. Brush over with clear water on taking them from the oven. Keep hot without drying out.
There is philosophy or something like it in that one egg. It closes the pores in the crust and retains the air of fermentation that otherwise would escape from the rough graham flour, and the result is increased lightness, softness, and better shape. No shortening should be allowed in the mixture. Such is the force of habit or custom, one must not expect to be accounted the best breadmaker in the world if our graham and brown breads be not brown, and our gingerbread be not "old-fashioned," that is dark colored. Graham rolls are expected to be light-brown in color. They don't look natural otherwise; they are nicer so and not so likely to be taken for second-rate French rolls. But now that the march of civilization has taken away our old-fashioned black molasses and given us colorless Illinois sorghum syrup instead, it is hard to see what else we can do but use a spoonful of burnt sugar caramel for coloring, else our brown breads cannot possibly be brown. The trifle of sweetening called for in graham rolls makes the crust thin and soft.
It is far better to set the sponge with the graham so as to soak and soften the bran, instead of taking up white bread sponge and working stiff with graham, as is oftenest done "for short." Best bread-makers in the world use themselves to the right ways from the first.
Pastrycooks do not and need not measure the flour. They measure the three-fourths water and one-fourth yeast, and add all the flour needed to make dough. A cup, or half pint of fluid wets a pound of flour. It is immaterial whether the dough be made by setting sponge, or batter with yeast in it, as previously directed, or all the ingredients put in a pan and mixed up at once. At night the latter way has to be adopted. The dough made by the receipt for graham rolls over night can be used part for loaves and part for muffins by the following short and easy method.
A whole-wheat supper roll built on a long morning sponge, with an unusually clear explanation of why the single egg is there. The measurements assume a bakeshop that worked by liquid volume rather than flour weight.
- The yeast is the one substitution you must makeHalf a pint of yeast means a cup of liquid barm or brewer's yeast, not modern packaged yeast. Use about 2 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast and add roughly a cup more warm water to make up the lost liquid.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour with the bran left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat works; "not sifted" is the point, since the bran is what the long sponge is meant to soften.
- Set the sponge with the graham, not with white flourThis is the hinge of the recipe and the author says so. Giving the bran three or four hours in the wet sponge soaks and softens it; the shortcut of stiffening a white sponge with graham at the end does not.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range. Fifteen minutes for a small roll implies a fairly quick oven; judge by colour rather than a number.
- Reboiled molasses and burnt sugarReboiled molasses appears to mean molasses boiled again to thicken and darken it. The caramel colouring the author suggests is essentially cosmetic; a spoonful is there for colour, not for sweetness.
- No shorteningThe instruction is deliberate. Fat goes only between the shaped rolls and on their tops, so they pull apart with soft sides while the crumb stays lean and light.
- The water washBrushing the hot rolls with plain water softens the crust as they are kept hot without drying out. Skip it if you want the tops crisp.
- Yield and scheduleFifty small rolls from three pounds of flour, better than five pounds of dough, so halve it for a household. The stated clock times (sponge at 9 or 10, mix at 1, rise until 4, shape and prove 45 minutes) are a working timetable, not fixed rules; judge by the dough.
Graham flour and the breads made from it descend from Sylvester Graham, the 1830s temperance lecturer and dietary reformer who preached coarse unsifted wheat meal and homemade bread against the fine white flour of commercial bakers. By the time this book was written the moral crusade had faded into a commercial expectation: brown bread had to look brown, and the author is candid that this is habit rather than nutrition. The aside about "colorless Illinois sorghum syrup" replacing old-fashioned black molasses is a small piece of economic history in passing, as Midwestern sorghum cane syrup competed with imported cane molasses in late nineteenth-century American kitchens. The whole entry reads as a working pastrycook's notebook rather than a housewife's manual, down to the remark that professionals do not weigh flour at all but measure liquid and add flour until the dough feels right.