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Graham Bread
1 cup thick sour milk cup molasses 1 cup Graham flour 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 cup wheat flour teaspoonful bakingpowder 1 teaspoonful soda Sift Graham and wheat flour and measure. Add baking-powder and salt; sift again. Dissolve soda in hot water, add to sour milk, and mix with molasses. Combine wet and dry mixtures, bake in bread-pan one and one-half hours. This will make one loaf.
A molasses-sweetened quick bread leavened three ways — soda against sour milk, plus baking powder. The text has come through with at least one quantity dropped, so read it carefully before you start.
- Missing measurementsThe molasses and baking-powder amounts have been lost in the printing: the line reads "cup molasses" and "teaspoonful baking-powder" with no figure. Comparable quick breads of the period use about 1/2 cup molasses and 1 teaspoon baking powder, but the original is genuinely ambiguous here.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and clabbered. Cultured buttermilk is the standard modern stand-in, cup for cup; plain kefir or thinned yogurt also works. Pasteurised milk left on the counter does not sour, it spoils.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat with the bran and germ left in. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest thing on a supermarket shelf; a coarse or "graham" grind if you can find one is nearer the mark.
- Sift, then measureThe instruction to sift before measuring is not decorative. Nineteenth-century flour packed hard in the barrel, and a sifted cup can weigh 20 percent less than a scooped one. Sift onto paper, spoon into the cup, level it off.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the soda keeps it from leaving bitter yellow streaks through the crumb. Add it to the sour milk, then combine everything quickly — once soda meets acid the gas begins escaping, so the batter should go into the pan at once.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. An hour and a half for a single loaf points to a slow to moderate oven, around 325F; molasses and whole grain both darken fast, so tent the top with foil if it colours before the centre sets.
- Pan and donenessA standard 8 1/2 by 4 1/2 inch loaf tin, greased. Test with a skewer in the middle rather than trusting the clock — the batter is wet and dark and looks done long before it is.
- KeepingOne loaf, roughly twelve slices. Quick breads of this kind are better on the second day, once the crumb has firmed and the molasses has settled; wrap it as soon as it is cool.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that white bolted flour stripped bread of what the body needed and campaigned for coarse unsifted wheat. By the time this book was printed his name had long outlived his movement and simply meant whole-meal flour on the grocer's shelf. Sour milk was a daily by-product in any kitchen before reliable refrigeration, which is part of why soda-and-molasses quick breads became so common in American home baking.