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Graham Bread (To one and a half pints)
To one and a half pints of tepid water add one heaping tea-spoon of salt and one-half cup of sugar; stir in one-half pint or more of the sponge made of white flour, as in recipe for "Bread with Potato Yeast;" add Graham flour until almost too stiff to stir; put in the baking-pan and let rise well, which will take about two hours, bake in a moderate oven, and when done, wrap in a wet towel until cool. -Mrs. Clara Woods Morey.
This is a batter bread rather than a kneaded loaf, and it depends on a separate white-flour sponge started earlier. Read the two recipes together before you begin.
- The sponge comes firstThe half pint (1 cup) of white-flour sponge is the leaven here; there is no other yeast in the list. If you are not building the potato-yeast sponge, substitute about 1 cup of active, bubbly white-flour starter or a same-day sponge made from 1 cup flour, 1 cup water and a teaspoon of instant yeast left to foam for a few hours.
- UnitsA pint is 2 cups, so one and a half pints of water is 3 cups. The half cup of sugar is generous by modern whole-grain standards and can be reduced with little effect on the rise.
- Tepid, not warmTepid means lukewarm, roughly 85-100F. Keep the water below about 120F; hotter than that begins to stress the yeast in the sponge.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely milled whole wheat with the bran and germ returned. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest current equivalent; it absorbs more water than white flour, so add it in stages.
- "Almost too stiff to stir"This is the hinge. The dough should be a heavy, sticky mass that just holds the mark of the spoon, not something you could knead on a board. Adding flour past that point gives a dense, dry loaf, since there is no kneading to develop structure.
- Oven heatA moderate oven is usually taken as roughly 350-375F. Expect 45 to 60 minutes for a large loaf; whole-wheat batter breads read done at about 200-205F in the center.
- The wet towelWrapping the hot loaf in a damp cloth steams the crust soft and keeps the coarse bran crumb from drying out. It is a deliberate finish, not a quirk, though it will cost you any crispness.
- YieldThree cups of water plus sponge makes a lot of dough by modern standards: enough for two 9x5 loaf pans, or one very large pan filled no more than two-thirds before rising.
Graham flour and the bread made from it are named for Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that finely bolted white flour stripped bread of what the body needed and that home-milled whole wheat, plainly baked, was the proper staple. By the time The Dixie Cook-Book appeared in 1883, "Graham" had passed out of the reform pamphlets and into ordinary bread chapters as simply the word for coarse whole wheat, sold by grocers and stocked in home kitchens alongside white flour. The recipe's reliance on a white-flour sponge is characteristic of the period, and it is often suggested that such a sponge was started in white flour because whole-grain doughs rise sluggishly, with the Graham stirred in afterward. Attribution to a named contributor, as here to Mrs. Clara Woods Morey, was standard practice in community-sourced cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s and is a reminder that these books circulated as collections of neighbors' working recipes.