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Rye and Indian
No different method is needed but to change the ingredients of Boston Brown so as to leave out the graham and the flour and double the proportions of meal and rye in their place.
Bakers' rye loaves are made by the same method as French loaves, and will be found in that connection at a subsequent page.
The Best White Bread and How to Make it.
Archestratus, a friend of one of Pericles' sons; * * this great writer, during his travels, did not make inquiring into the manners of nations, since they always remain the same, but going into the laboratories where the delicacies of the table are prepared, he only held intercourse with those who could advance his pleasure.--Philosophical History of Cookery. The ardent dietetic morality which extolled the bread that was coarsest, brownest, stalest and most truly home-made, and caused fine white and fresh bread to be swallowed as if it were a sin against nature, is classed among the "Isms of forty years ago" in one of the January magazines. Dr. Sylvester Graham of Connecticut, started the reform, which, running to great lengths at first, has resulted in the long run, in a happy mean, a modifiction, and greater variety in the popular bill of fare. The people in great numbers, who find the white rolls and bread irresistible may reap satisfaction from finding so eminent an authority as the author of "Gastronomy" in their favor. His prescription, the groundwork of his cure for thinness, for "a young sylph, or other airy creature, who wishes to assume a more material form" is "first of all, make it a general role to eat nothing but newly-baked bread, especially the crumb, and plenty of it." And he had studied such matters all his life. But as there are dinners and dinners,--so Cardinal Richelieu remarks to his major domo, meaning that some are very bad,--so it should be said about bread. The rolls of Limet, of Rue de Richelieu, could not hurt anybody. On one occasion the writer was called upon as a probably competent judge to pass opinion on the work of one of the reputed very best bread makers. There is a dubious kind of excellence in this line as in everything else that does not feel able to stand alone but always wants somebody to keep saying it excels. Such was the case here. The bread was extremely fine, yet, I venture to say the people did not enjoy it except to look at, and felt that some essential quality was lacking. It was white as chalk and a good deal like it; fine-grained as delicate cake, but had no toughness nor elasticity and crumbled when broken, like meal. It had a sweetish insipidity of taste, instead of the hearty relishing wheat flavor of good bread. It was made so by an immense amount of kneading the wrong way.
These people did not invite instruction nor criticism, only praise. I said the bread was superlatively fine, and the lady was one of the best breadmakers in the world. That the bread was not good was a mental reservation. We all frequently make bread that is fine but not good, and they that have such for their regular diet sometimes find in a loaf of common bakers' bread a new revelation of how swee the taste of bread can be, and wonder whence springs the difference. It is not what the bakers put in the bread but the proper method of working.
Just the other day a magazinist spoke of good bread making as a lost art. A figure of speech, perhaps, or else the opinion of a lover of good bread whose experiences have been bad; but if there be any grounds for such an idea to rest on the cause may be found in the unwillingness of instructors in cookery to properly dwell upon so seemingly simple and self-evident a matter as the proper way of kneading dough. And very recently another intimated how many persons accustomed to "biscuit streaked with saleratus and heavy with lard, regard rolls white and light as newly-fallen snow as something belonging to the households of princes, to the King of France's Kitchen, but not to be freely eaten by common folks." Now it is cheaper to have good bread than bad and the bare formula for making it being so little and the understanding how so much, we are going to do our best to endeavor to draw attention to what the knack of making bread both good and fine consists in-yeast and flour being good to begin with.
It took one, otherwise excellent, pastry cook ten years to discover this knack for himself, but he was all the while the worst mystified man imaginable, because he had, when a boy, made rolls that people would eat in preference to anything else, while now every other kind of bread was preferred to his handsomest rolls The fault with them was the same as with the lady's fine, brittle and tasteless bread already spoken of.
This man had been shown how to work in a routine way in a large bakery without ever being impressed with any idea of the particular way being essential to good quality, and when, afterwards, in a French kitchen where ornamentation was run to the extreme at the expense often of good flavor, he exercised his ingenuity till he could make rolls in forty different fancy shapes, he found, after all, they were in little demand. He worked all the life out of the dough in making it into curliques. Then in a busy time a very common fellow came along and was set to make the rolls. He was too common even to have a name except a familiar Tom, Dick, or Harry and was quite unconcious that the rolls he made were the first that had ever been eaten with a real zest and favored with a constantly increasing demand in that house. But after that the fancy breads were neglected and there was less cry for toast. Even the "help"-excellent judges of what is good, although discretely silent-would steal the new man's rolls out of the corners of the pans as they passed-a thing never known to be done before, as long as a biscuit could be had. And all the difference was in two different ways of working the same materials The superiority of the common fellow's rolls and bread was all owing to his kneading the dough the right way.