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Entire Wheat Bread
2 cups scalded milk 1/4 cup sugar or 1/3 cup molasses 2 teaspoons salt 1 yeast cake dissolved in ¼ cup lukewarm water 4⅔ cups coarse entire wheat flour Add sweetening and salt to milk; cool, and when lukewarm add dissolved yeast cake and flour; beat well, cover, and let rise to double its bulk. Again beat, and turn into greased bread pans, having pans one-half full; let rise, and bake. Entire Wheat Bread should not quite double its bulk during last rising. This mixture may be baked in gem pans.
A straightforward yeasted loaf from Fannie Farmer's era, made with whole wheat flour and no kneading — the dough is beaten rather than worked by hand. A few of the measurements and materials need translating.
- The yeastOne "yeast cake" is a cake of compressed fresh yeast, roughly 0.6 oz. Substitute 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry yeast, softened in 1/4 cup lukewarm water as directed.
- Flour quantityThe flour figure has come through garbled. A batter-style loaf on 2 cups of milk takes somewhere near 4 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour; add it gradually until you have a stiff batter that just holds a spoon upright rather than a kneadable dough.
- Entire wheat flour"Entire wheat" is close to modern whole wheat, though period sources describe it as the kernel with only the outer bran sifted out, while graham flour of the same era was the unbolted whole kernel and coarser still. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; it drinks more liquid than white flour, so let the batter stand a few minutes before judging its consistency.
- Scalding the milkScalding is generally explained as deactivating something in raw milk that weakens gluten. With pasteurized milk it is usually treated as unnecessary, but the recipe assumes hot milk that is then cooled — let it come below about 110F before the yeast goes in.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 375F for 40 to 50 minutes; the loaf is done at an internal temperature of 200-205F and sounds hollow when tapped from the pan.
- The last riseThe instruction not to let it quite double is the one that matters. Whole wheat has less gluten strength than white flour, and a fully proofed loaf collapses in the oven. Take it to about three-quarters risen, when the dough crests just below the pan rim.
- Molasses versionThe half cup of molasses gives a darker, moister, more sharply flavored loaf than the quarter cup of sugar.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many pans; the quantity is roughly enough for two small loaf tins filled half full, as directed. Gem pans were the cast-iron muffin pans of the day, and baked that way the loaves become rolls needing considerably less time in the oven.
Whole wheat bread had a moral as well as a nutritional reputation in the America of the 1890s, inherited from Sylvester Graham's campaign of the 1830s and 1840s against fine white flour and refined food generally. By the time Fannie Farmer compiled the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, roller milling had made white flour cheap and universal, and "entire wheat" loaves were the deliberate choice of households persuaded that the bran and germ were worth keeping. The batter method here — beat, rise, beat again, pan, rise, bake, with no kneading at all — dispenses with kneading altogether.