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Graham Bread (Take a little over a quart)
Take a little over a quart of warm water, one-half cup brown sugar or molasses, one-fourth cup hop yeast, and one and one half tea-spoons salt; thicken the water with unbolted flour to a thin batter; add sugar, salt and yeast, and stir in more flour until quite stiff. In the morning add a small tea-spoon soda, and flour enough to make the batter stiff as can be stirred with a spoon; put it into pans and let rise again; then bake in even oven, not too hot at first; keep warm while rising; smooth over the loaves with a spoon or knife dipped in water. - Mrs. H. B. Sherman, Plankinton House, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
A batter bread rather than a kneaded one: the dough never gets stiff enough to handle, which is why it is smoothed with a wet spoon instead of shaped. The overnight sponge and the morning soda are the two things to get right.
- Unbolted flour"Unbolted" means the bran was never sifted out — what the book elsewhere calls graham flour. Modern stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest match; standard whole wheat works, though it is more finely milled and will drink slightly more water.
- Hop yeastA home-brewed liquid yeast kept going in a jar, made by boiling hops with flour and potato and leaving it to ferment. Its strength varied from jar to jar, so any modern equivalence is rough — a quarter cup was doing roughly the work of a packet of dry yeast — and it also carried a sour tang the dry yeast will not give you.
- The morning sodaThe small teaspoon of soda is not there for lift; it neutralises the acidity built up by the sponge overnight. Dissolve it in a spoonful of warm water before stirring it in, or it will leave bitter streaks. Skip it and the loaf will taste distinctly sour.
- QuantitiesA little over a quart of water plus flour to a stiff batter makes about 4 to 5 pounds of dough — three 8x4 inch loaf pans, or two large ones. Grease them well; this batter sticks.
- "Even oven, not too hot at first"A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, suits it; whole-grain batter breads set slowly through the middle. Reckon on 45 to 60 minutes for standard loaf pans, until the internal temperature reads 200-205F. The recipe itself gives no figure, only that it should not be hot at the start — plausibly because a wood range was fiercest just after stoking.
- Timing the spongeThe overnight rise assumes a cool nineteenth-century kitchen, not a 70F one. Eight to ten hours at room temperature is right; if your kitchen is warm, the sponge will be ready in five or six and should not be left to collapse.
- Keeping warm while rising"Keep warm" meant near the range. Whole wheat batters are sluggish, so give the panned loaves a genuinely warm spot and expect an hour or more before they crest the pan rim.
- Sugar or molassesEither works, but molasses darkens the crumb considerably and its acidity gives the soda more to react with. Brown sugar produces the lighter, milder loaf.
Graham bread takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and diet reformer whose lectures in the 1830s and 1840s pressed Americans to eat coarse, unsifted wheat meal instead of the fashionable white flour, and to bake their own bread at home rather than buy it from bakers. By the time The Dixie Cook Book appeared in 1883 his name had detached from his moralising and simply meant whole-meal flour, as it still does on a box of graham crackers. The recipe's other period marker is the hop yeast: commercial compressed yeast was available in American cities from the 1870s, but many households continued to keep a hop-and-potato yeast going on the shelf, and cookbooks of this era print recipes for both. The attribution to a contributor at the Plankinton House, then one of Milwaukee's grand hotels, is typical of the book: credits of this kind, naming hotel kitchens and housekeepers, are printed throughout.