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Old Fashioned Graham Bread
Mrs. Pulsifer.
One teacup of good yeast, one quart of warm water, one teaspoon of salt, two cups sugar, or less, one small teaspoon soda, stir in enough white winter wheat Graham flour to make it stiff enough to drop off the spoon readily grease your bread pans, put in, and set to rise, let it get quite light, then bake in a moderate oven for threequarters of an hour.
This is a batter bread, not a kneaded dough — the flour goes in only until the mixture drops from the spoon, and it rises once, in the pan. The proportions assume a wild, sour homemade yeast, which explains two things a modern baker will find odd: the soda and the sugar.
- The teacup of yeastA teacup here means liquid barm or sponge yeast, not dry granules; the measure was not standardised and is variously reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 8 fl oz. There is no clean conversion; a rough modern substitute is a couple of teaspoons of instant yeast, with the water increased to compensate for the lost liquid.
- Why the soda is thereHomemade yeast was often lactic and sharp by the time it was used. The small teaspoon of soda neutralised that sourness. With commercial yeast there is nothing to neutralise, and the soda will only give a faint soapy, mineral note — leave it out.
- Two cups of sugarThat is a very sweet loaf by present standards, closer to a tea bread. Half a cup, or a third of a cup of molasses, gives the darker, faintly bitter sweetness most people associate with Graham bread. The recipe itself allows "or less."
- Graham flourCoarse-ground whole wheat, milled with the bran and germ left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest thing on a shelf now; "white winter wheat" means a softer, lower-protein wheat, so the crumb should be tender rather than chewy.
- Stiff enough to drop off the spoonThis is the hinge. It should be a thick batter that falls from a spoon in a lump, not a dough you can handle. Roughly 6 to 7 cups of Graham flour to the quart of water, but go by feel — whole wheat absorbs water at different rates depending on grind.
- Let it get quite lightThe batter should roughly double and look domed and bubbly; how long that takes depends entirely on the yeast, and with a homemade barm it could be several hours. Batter breads collapse if pushed past that point; there is too little gluten structure to hold them up.
- A moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F. Three-quarters of an hour suits two standard 8½ x 4½ inch loaf pans. The loaves are done at an internal temperature of 200-205F; a dark sweet crumb like this browns long before the centre is set.
- YieldThe plural 'your bread pans' tells you the batch fills more than one pan; a quart of water will make two or three loaves depending on the size of the tin.
Graham bread takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer whose 1830s campaign against refined white flour urged Americans back to coarse, unbolted wheat as a matter of health and moral discipline. By the time The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s, Graham flour had become a familiar pantry item, though it kept much of its association with health reform, and it served as the basis of a plain family loaf contributed here by a named neighbour, Mrs. Pulsifer, in the manner common to community cookbooks. The recipe belongs to the era of the domestic yeast pot rather than the yeast packet: the cook kept a live starter going, judged its liveliness by smell, and corrected its sourness with a pinch of soda.