Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Pastry of Graham Flour
Pastry of Graham Flour
Half a pound of Graham flour, one cup of sweet cream, a little salt; mix and roll and bake in the usual way with fruit between the crusts.
A two-ingredient pastry that relies on cream for all of its fat, which makes it behave quite differently from a butter or lard crust. A few gaps in the original need filling before it works.
- Half a pound of Graham flourWeigh it rather than scooping: 8 oz is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 cups of whole wheat flour, depending on how coarse the grind is.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" means fresh and unsoured, as opposed to the sour cream or clabber many period recipes call for. Use heavy cream, around 36% fat; light cream or half-and-half will not carry enough fat to make the dough tender.
- There is no added shorteningThe cream is the only fat, so handle the dough as little as possible and keep it cold. Chilling it for half an hour before rolling makes it easier to handle.
- Rolling whole wheatGraham dough tears where white flour would stretch. Roll it between sheets of parchment or floured waxed paper and patch cracks with scraps rather than re-rolling.
- "Bake in the usual way"The book gives no temperature, and stoves of the period had no thermostat. As a modern equivalent for a filled double-crust fruit pie: start at 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then 350-375F for another 30-40 minutes until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- The fruit is left entirely to youThe original assumes the cook knows her filling. For a 9-inch pie, figure 5-6 cups of prepared fruit with 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar and 2-3 tablespoons flour or cornstarch, more for very juicy berries.
- YieldHalf a pound of flour makes enough for one 9-inch double crust, rolled thin, or a single crust plus a lattice.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer who in the 1830s campaigned for coarse, unsifted, home-ground wheat against the white bolted flour of commercial bakers. By the time The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the mid-1870s from contributions by local women, Graham flour had shed most of its reforming zeal and settled into ordinary domestic use, turning up in gems, muffins, breads and, as here, pastry. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the genre: these were notes traded between cooks who already knew what "the usual way" meant. That cream stands in for butter or lard is worth noting too, since a household with its own dairy had cream more readily to hand than a cook buying fat by the pound.