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Brown Bread
Mrs. Wm. Blair..
Take part of the sponge that has been prepared for your white bread, warm water can be added, mix it with Graham flour (not too stiff).
FOR BROWN BISCUIT. - Take this Graham dough, as prepared for bread, working in a little butter. Butter the size of an egg is sufficient for two dozen biscuits .
This is a fragment rather than a full formula: it assumes you already have a bowl of white-bread sponge working on the back of the stove, and it gives no times, temperatures or quantities. Everything below is what a modern cook has to supply.
- What the sponge isA sponge is a loose, batter-like preferment of flour, water and yeast left to rise until bubbly and domed, usually several hours or overnight. The recipe expects you to have one going for white bread and to scoop off a portion; it never says how much, so the amount is left to the cook's judgement.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, named for Sylvester Graham and still sold under that name. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; it drinks more water than white flour, which may be why the recipe allows warm water to be added.
- "Not too stiff"This is the hinge. Whole-wheat dough that is mixed firm goes dense and dry, because the bran cuts the gluten. Aim for a slack, slightly tacky dough that just clears the bowl, and resist the urge to flour it into submission.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Spread across two dozen biscuits that is a very lean enrichment by modern standards, closer to a soft roll than to a rich dinner roll.
- "Biscuit" in this book"Biscuit" here -- Not a baking-powder biscuit. In this recipe the biscuit is a small roll shaped from the same yeast-raised Graham dough, proofed again and baked; the leavening comes entirely from the sponge. Period American usage covered both senses, so other receipts in the book may mean something different.
- No temperature is givenNothing in the recipe indicates oven heat or timing. As a modern starting point, a loaf of this dough can be baked at around 375F for 35 to 45 minutes and small biscuits hotter and shorter, but this is supplied by the modern cook, not the original.
- Second riseBecause the dough is already half-fermented when you take it from the sponge, the shaped loaf or biscuits need only one further rise, until roughly doubled and slow to spring back. Overproofed whole-wheat dough collapses in the oven.
- YieldThe recipe names only two dozen biscuits; it says nothing about loaf count or total weight of dough, so any figure for batch size is a modern guess.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by named local women and sold to raise money for charity, and is often described as one of the earliest and most influential American community cookbooks; the format, with each receipt signed by its donor, was copied for decades afterward. The attribution to Mrs. Wm. Blair is the whole authority behind the recipe, and its brevity is characteristic: contributors, it is generally assumed, wrote for neighbors who already kept a sponge working and needed only the variation, not the method. Graham flour itself carried a mild reformist charge, taking its name from Sylvester Graham, the 1830s dietary preacher who urged unsifted whole-meal bread on a public he thought had been ruined by fine white flour. By the 1870s the moral argument seems to have faded, and Graham flour was, by most accounts, simply another thing on the pantry shelf, useful for making a brown loaf out of dough you had already started for a white one.