Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Dyspepsia Bread
Dyspepsia Bread
Mix the desired quantity of unsifted wheat meal with some soft warm water, with a quarter of that amount of molasses and fresh yeast, a teaspoonful of carbonate of ammonia, and shape into loaves and bake for an hour.
A skeleton recipe even by the standards of its book: no weights, no oven setting, and no mention of kneading or rising. What follows is what a competent baker needs to fill in.
- Unsifted wheat mealThis is coarse whole-wheat meal with the bran left in, sold today as whole-wheat flour, graham flour, or stoneground wholemeal. The whole point of the loaf was that nothing had been sifted out, so do not substitute white flour.
- The proportions are relative, not absoluteThe only ratio given is 'a quarter of that amount', most naturally read as molasses at a quarter of the water, though the phrase could equally refer to the meal, and it is unclear whether the fresh yeast falls under the same fraction. Reading it as a quarter of the water: for a standard loaf, figure roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups whole-wheat meal, about 1 cup warm water and 1/4 cup molasses; that gives a dense, dark, slightly sweet dough. Everything else is guesswork on the original's part as much as yours.
- Carbonate of ammoniaAmmonium carbonate, sold now as baker's ammonia or hartshorn. It is still a legitimate leavener, but it breaks down into ammonia gas and needs thin, dry baked goods to drive that gas off. In a tall loaf it can leave an ammoniac smell in the crumb. Given that the recipe also calls for yeast, the teaspoonful can be left out with no loss.
- Fresh yeastFresh compressed yeast, about 3/5 oz for this quantity, or substitute 2 1/4 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast. Molasses at this level slows the rise, so expect a slow, sluggish ferment.
- The missing stepsNo kneading or proofing is mentioned, presumably because both were taken for granted. Knead until the dough holds together and pulls smooth, let it rise until roughly doubled, shape, and let the loaves prove again before they go in.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven term from which one could be read off. An hour's bake is consistent with a moderate oven; 350F is a sensible modern setting for a loaf pan, and a wholemeal loaf this heavy is done at an internal temperature of 195 to 200F. Check at 45 minutes, since dark molasses crusts scorch before the centre sets.
- YieldOne loaf as scaled above. It slices best fully cold, and it is markedly better toasted.
"Dyspepsia bread" was a fixture of nineteenth-century American cookery long before Oscar put it in a Waldorf book, and its ancestry is generally traced to Sylvester Graham and the reform diet movement of the 1830s, which held that finely sifted white flour had been robbed of the coarse bran the digestion required. Dyspepsia was the period's catch-all name for chronic indigestion, and unsifted wheat meal loaves sweetened with molasses were prescribed for it in domestic manuals for decades. Its appearance in a great hotel's collection is a reminder that a kitchen like the Waldorf's was expected to cook for invalids and special diets as readily as for the dining room, and that a chef's repertoire included plain bread meant as medicine rather than pleasure.