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Gluten Bread
Mix a pound and a half of fresh, moist gluten, three and a quarter drachms of bicarbonate of ammonia, a little salt and some powdered caraway and four and a half ounces of wheaten flour, an ounce and a quarter of powdered bran and four ounces of salt butter. Mix well and place in flat tin pans; bake on a moderately heated hearth.
A diabetic-diet bread from an era when "gluten bread" was a medical food, and one that behaves nothing like a modern loaf. The leavening and the pan shape are linked, and getting either wrong ruins it.
- Why the pans must be flatBicarbonate of ammonia (baker's ammonia, hartshorn) leavens by breaking down into ammonia gas, which has to escape during baking. In a thin, flat bake it vents; in a tall loaf it stays trapped and the crumb tastes sharply of ammonia. The instruction to use flat tin pans is the hinge of the recipe, not a stylistic preference.
- Moist glutenThis means the rubbery mass left after washing the starch out of wheat dough; the recipe's 'fresh, moist' suggests it was prepared rather than bought dry. Vital wheat gluten powder is the modern equivalent; hydrated to a comparable dough it takes roughly a third of its weight in gluten to two-thirds water, though the original's moisture content is not recorded and you will need to judge by feel.
- The drachm is ambiguousThree and a quarter drachms is either about 5.8 g (avoirdupois dram, 1/16 oz) or about 12.6 g (apothecaries' drachm, 1/8 oz). Given that the source is a diet bread often written up by physicians, the apothecaries' reading is plausible, but the recipe does not say. That is a wide range for a leavener and worth resolving on a small test batch.
- Wheaten flour and branWheaten flour here is ordinary wheat flour, most likely white, though the term was used loosely in the period. The four and a half ounces is a small fraction of the gluten by weight, deliberately so, since the whole point was to keep starch low. Powdered bran is finely milled wheat bran, still sold as such.
- Moderately heated hearthThe floor of a brick oven at moderate heat. The original gives no temperature; modern practice usually reads a 'moderate' oven as somewhere around 350F, and a baking stone or heavy sheet preheated at that temperature approximates the bottom heat assumed here.
- Salt butterOrdinary salted butter. Four ounces to a pound and a half of gluten is a high proportion, and it is doing structural work: gluten alone bakes to something close to leather, and the fat keeps the crumb from setting rigid.
- CarawayThe powdered caraway is likely there to relieve the flavour rather than to characterise it; gluten breads were often complained of as dull. Reduce or omit it if you want to taste what the bread actually is.
- Yield and eatingAbout two pounds of dough, enough for two flat pan loaves. The recipe assumes more than one pan. Best eaten the day it is baked.
Gluten bread belongs to the late nineteenth-century medical kitchen rather than the bakery. Before insulin, the standard management of diabetes was severe restriction of starch and sugar, and washed gluten, bran and almond preparations were sold as substitutes for ordinary bread. Commercial gluten flours were marketed on both sides of the Atlantic during the nineteenth century, with varying and often disputed starch content, and cookbooks of the period carried a handful of recipes for turning them into something edible. The bicarbonate of ammonia is also of its time, a leavener favoured for thin, quick bakes and still used in some traditional biscuits and Scandinavian cookies today.