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Third Bread
1 cup rye flour 1 cup granulated corn meal 3 cups flour Dissolve yeast cake in water, add remaining ingredients, and mix thoroughly. Let rise, shape, let rise again, and bake as Entire Wheat Bread.
This is a cross-reference recipe: Farmer gives only the three flours and sends you back to Entire Wheat Bread for the liquid, sweetening, salt, yeast and baking. Read both before starting.
- The recipe is incomplete as printedNo quantity of water, milk, salt or sweetening appears here, and "dissolve yeast cake in water" gives neither the size of the cake nor the amount of water. All of it lives in the Entire Wheat Bread entry, which supplies the scalded milk, the molasses or sugar, the salt and the yeast cake softened in lukewarm water. Take the amounts from that recipe directly rather than from any figures quoted here.
- Yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes were sold in varying sizes; the modern 0.6 oz cake is the usual stand-in, which corresponds to roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Instant can go straight into the flour rather than being dissolved.
- Granulated corn mealMost probably ordinary cornmeal rather than hominy grits, though period use of "granulated" varied and may point to a coarser grind. Ordinary supermarket meal will do. Scalding the meal with the hot liquid before the flours go in gives a softer crumb, though Farmer does not call for it.
- Rye flourA medium rye is a reasonable modern choice, though what was sold in 1896 cannot be pinned down. Rye and cornmeal between them contribute little functional gluten, so the three cups of white flour are doing most of the structural work; adding more rye will make the loaf denser and gummier.
- Kneading and risingExpect a slack, slightly sticky dough that never becomes smooth and elastic the way an all-wheat dough does. First rise until doubled, about 1 1/2 hours at room temperature; shaped loaves need 45 minutes to an hour more.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature; around 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent for a loaf of this kind. Two loaves in standard 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 in pans take 45 to 60 minutes; an internal temperature of 200-205F is a more reliable test than the hollow knock on a heavy mixed-grain loaf.
- YieldThe five cups of flour make one large or two small loaves. Bread of this kind stales quickly and is best eaten within a day or two, or toasted after that.
The name is often said to describe its three flours, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented. New England had been mixing rye and Indian meal since the colonial period, when wheat was scarce and expensive along the northern coast while rye grew well and maize grew everywhere; "rye and Indian" bread and the steamed brown bread that outlived it both come out of that shortage. By the time Fannie Farmer published The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in 1896, cheap roller-milled white flour from the Midwest had made such mixtures unnecessary, and this loaf appears in the book all the same. Its position in the bread chapter, among a run of related recipes, shows how Farmer taught: one worked procedure, then a series of flour substitutions hung off it.