Graham Paste
Mix lightly half a pound Graham flour, half a pint sweet cream, half a teaspoon salt, roll, and bake like other pastry.
Three ingredients and one line of instruction, which puts the burden on the cook to supply the technique. This is a cream pastry: the fat comes entirely from the cream, so the handling matters more than the measuring.
- The weights in cupsHalf a pound of graham flour is about 1 3/4 cups, scooped lightly. Half a pint of cream is 1 cup. Modern heavy cream at 36 percent fat gives roughly 1/3 cup of butterfat in the dough, which is lean for pastry — expect something closer to a sturdy biscuit crust than flaky puff.
- "Sweet cream"This means fresh cream as opposed to soured or cultured cream, not sweetened cream. Use plain heavy cream and add no sugar.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, milled with the bran and germ left in. Stone-ground whole wheat is the closest current equivalent; ordinary whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer, less nubbly crust.
- Add the cream graduallyGraham flour absorbs liquid slowly and unevenly. Hold back a few tablespoons of the cream, mix, wait two or three minutes, then judge — a full cup can leave the dough slack at first and stiff twenty minutes later.
- Rest before rollingThe original skips this. Half an hour wrapped in the refrigerator lets the bran soften and hydrate, which is the difference between a dough that rolls out and one that shreds at the edges.
- "Bake like other pastry"The recipe gives no temperature or time, assuming the cook already knows how she bakes a crust. Around 425F suits pastry of this kind: a filled pie runs 40 to 50 minutes; a blind-baked shell, docked and weighted, needs about 15 minutes at 425F and then 10 more at 375F.
- YieldAbout enough for one 9-inch single crust with a little to spare; it will not comfortably stretch to a double crust. Roll it slightly thicker than a white-flour crust -- thin graham pastry tends to crack.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer whose 1830s dietary campaign urged coarse unsifted whole wheat over the fashionable fine white flour of the day. His followers held that bran was morally as well as physically improving, and by the second half of the century graham flour was a common item in American groceries, well detached from its founder's stricter doctrines. Its appearance in the pastry chapter of a Southern compilation like The Dixie Cook Book shows how far the idea had traveled: not a health-reform tract but simply an alternative crust, cheaper in fat than a butter or lard pastry and often promoted as the more wholesome choice for everyday pies.