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Graham Flour Bread
Mix six breakfast cupfuls of Graham flour with a little sugar and salt, half a cupful of yeast, and work to a dough, adding a pint of scalded milk (cool), and make a little softer than white bread. Raise till light and then stir down, pour it into well-greased pans, or, if stiff enough, shape into loaves, let it rise again and bake a little longer in a slightly cooler oven than that used for white bread. Graham flour rises more quickly than white bread.
A plain whole-wheat loaf from the hotel's bread station, written for cooks who kept liquid yeast on hand and knew their own oven. Two things need translating: the yeast and the heat.
- The yeastHalf a cupful means liquid yeast or barm, not the dried granules sold today. Substitute about 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast, and add back roughly half a cup of water or milk to make up the lost liquid.
- Breakfast cupfulsA breakfast cup is a large cup, generally reckoned somewhat bigger than a teacup; treating it as a standard 8 oz cup is near enough for bread work. Six cups of graham flour is about 1 1/2 lb, which with a pint of milk gives a soft dough -- the recipe asks for it a little softer than white bread, and the yeast adds more liquid still.
- Graham flourCoarse, unsifted whole wheat, including the bran and germ. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; ordinary fine whole-wheat flour works but gives a smoother, less nutty crumb.
- Why the milk is scaldedScalding is usually said to deactivate something in raw milk that slackens gluten, and it also dealt with spoilage organisms. Whether pasteurized milk still benefits from scalding is disputed; either way it has to be cooled to lukewarm before it meets the yeast.
- Salt and sugarThe original leaves both unmeasured. For six cups of flour, about 2 teaspoons of salt and 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar is in keeping.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven term beyond 'slightly cooler than that used for white bread'. If white bread is taken at roughly 425 to 450F, that puts this loaf around 375 to 400F, with 40 to 50 minutes in the oven. Bran-heavy doughs brown early, so judge by an internal temperature of 200 to 205F rather than by crust colour.
- Watch the second riseThe note that graham rises more quickly is the practical hinge. Bran interferes with the gluten network, so an over-proofed loaf is liable to collapse in the oven. Bake it when the dough is not quite doubled.
- YieldEnough for two loaves in 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch pans, or one large free-form loaf if the dough is stiff enough to shape.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Connecticut-born Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s and 1840s, who preached against fine white flour and in favour of coarse, unbolted home-ground wheat. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the dining rooms of the Waldorf at the turn of the century, the moral crusade had faded into an ordinary commercial product: bakers sold graham flour, and hotels put a graham loaf on the bread tray beside the white rolls for guests who wanted something plainer and thought it wholesome. The instruction to scald the milk and the casual half-cupful of yeast tell us at least that the leaven was a liquid one, measured by the cup rather than the cake.