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Traveller's Bread
Take Graham flour (unsifted); and currants, figs, tes or raisins may be used by chopping them; stir ite stiffly with the coldest water as briskly as possible, as to incorporate air with it; then knead in all the bolted wheat flour you can; cut in cakes or rolls onef inch thick, and bake in a quick oven.
An unleavened water bread from the Graham-flour era, written in the compressed style of a note passed between cooks. The text has clearly been garbled in typesetting, so a few readings have to be inferred.
- Read the typos"tes" is almost certainly "dates", "stir ite" is "stir it", and "onef inch" is "one inch". The sense of the instructions is otherwise intact.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; ordinary whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer crumb.
- Bolted wheat flourBolted means sifted through cloth to remove the bran, so this is simply white flour. It is being used here as the stiffening agent, kneaded in until the dough will hold a cut shape.
- No leavening at allThere is no soda, no baking powder, no yeast. The only lift comes from air beaten in during the cold-water stirring, which is why the recipe insists on doing it briskly. Expect a dense, close-textured cake rather than anything light.
- Coldest waterUse very cold water and work fast. Cold water slows gluten development, which may be why it is specified. Quantity is not given: the recipe says to stir it "stiffly", so add only enough water to make a stiff mixture before you begin kneading in the white flour.
- A quick ovenConventionally reckoned at roughly 400-425F. The recipe gives no time; at one inch thick, expect something in the range of 20-30 minutes, judging doneness when firm and hollow-sounding underneath.
- FruitChop currants, figs, dates or raisins and add them to the Graham flour before the water goes in, so they distribute rather than clump. The recipe gives no quantities; roughly a cup of fruit to four cups of flour is a modern guess.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no quantities, so yield depends entirely on how much you scale it to. Unleavened and with no fat, the cakes will be dense and dry; nothing in the text says how they were eaten.
"Traveller's bread" belongs to the nineteenth-century family of hard, keeping breads made without yeast or chemical leaven: quick to mix, cheap, and sturdy enough for a satchel or a wagon box. The Graham flour is the tell. Sylvester Graham's campaign of the 1830s and 1840s for unsifted whole-meal flour, cold water and plain food had a long afterlife in American domestic cookery, and by the time The Home Cook Book was compiled his name attached to flour, to crackers and to a general dietary attitude rather than to a movement. The insistence on beating cold water briskly "as to incorporate air" may reflect a period preference for aeration over soda or yeast, though the recipe itself says nothing about why, and the idea should not be pinned on any particular circle. That it is placed under "Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen" suggests it came in as a contributed household note rather than a tested formula, which would explain both the shorthand and the garbled printing.