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Graham Biscuits
Mrs. Brodie.
One quart of Graham flour, three and one-half heaping teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder, one teaspoor of salt, one of butter. Make into soft dough with milk.
A bare-bones quick bread from a Canadian charity cookbook, written for a cook who already knew what a biscuit dough should feel like. The gaps — no oven, no time, no quantity of milk — are the parts worth filling in.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in a quart measure, not weighed: roughly 4 cups, or about 450-480 g of Graham flour. Scoop and level rather than packing it, since Graham flour compresses easily.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour with the bran and germ left in, milled more roughly than modern whole wheat. Ordinary whole-wheat flour works; adding a couple of tablespoons of wheat bran gets closer to the original texture.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian proprietary baking powder of the period. Any double-acting baking powder can stand in, but note that three and a half *heaping* teaspoons is considerably more than four level ones.
- One teaspoon of butterThat is unusually little fat even for a plain biscuit, and the result will be closer to a scone-hard roll than to a flaky one. A tablespoon or two, rubbed in cold, gives the tenderness most cooks now expect.
- "Soft dough with milk"Expect about 1 1/2 to 2 cups, added gradually until the dough just holds together and is slightly sticky. Graham flour drinks more liquid than white, and it keeps absorbing for a minute or two after mixing, so stop short and let it stand rather than over-flouring.
- The hinge: handle it barely at allMix only until the dry flour disappears, pat out to about 3/4 inch rather than rolling, and cut straight down without twisting the cutter. Bran fragments cut gluten strands, so an overworked Graham dough goes dense rather than tough.
- OvenNone is given. Bake in a hot oven, 425-450F, for 12-15 minutes, until the tops are set and browned; a slow oven dries these out before they rise.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 biscuits from a 2-inch cutter. They are best within an hour of baking and stale quickly.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold for charity, which is why so many of its entries carry a contributor's name and so little detail. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer who campaigned from the 1830s for coarse unbolted wheat against the fashionable white loaf; by the time this book appeared, his name had detached from his sermons and simply meant whole-meal flour on a sack.