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Entire Wheat or Bran Bread
1 cup boiling water 1 teaspoon salt 2⅔ cups flour 1 cup scalded milk 4⅔ cups coarse entire yeast cake mixed with cup molasses wheat flour cup lukewarm water Follow general directions. Use more yeast if bread is not allowed to rise overnight.
A plain overnight-rise brown bread built on the book's "general directions" for yeast doughs, which the original assumes you have already read. The ingredient quantities as printed are incomplete, so treat the proportions below as a guide rather than a formula.
- Entire wheat flour"Entire wheat" is whole wheat, milled to include the bran and germ; "coarse" means a stone-ground grind rather than the fine whole-wheat flour sold today. Stone-ground whole wheat or whole wheat with a few tablespoons of wheat bran added comes closest.
- The two flours are not interchangeableThe 2 cups of white flour help carry the gluten structure; the 4 cups of coarse whole wheat weigh the loaf down. Shifting the ratio further toward whole wheat gives a denser, flatter loaf.
- Compressed yeast cakeA yeast cake of this era was normally fresh compressed yeast, though cake sizes varied by maker. The modern 0.6 oz cake is the nearest equivalent, about 2 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. The recipe does not say how much more yeast to use for a same-day loaf; doubling is a reasonable starting point.
- Scalded milkScalding raw milk was held to counteract something in it that slackened dough; modern explanations point to whey proteins rather than enzymes. With pasteurised milk it is generally considered unnecessary; warm it to about 110F and proceed. Do not add the yeast until the milk and boiling water together have cooled to lukewarm, or the yeast will die.
- Molasses, not sugarThe molasses is there for colour and for the faintly bitter, mineral flavour associated with bran breads. Unsulphured light molasses is a reasonable modern choice; blackstrap is far more assertive than intended.
- The overnight riseA cool, slow rise of eight to ten hours is what this dough is designed for and where most of its flavour comes from. A modern equivalent is to mix at night, let it rise in a cool room or the refrigerator, then shape and give a final rise in the morning.
- BakingThe book's general directions govern the oven; for a loaf of this size and density, 375F for 40 to 50 minutes is the usual range, until the bottom sounds hollow and the internal temperature reaches about 200F.
- YieldSix cups of flour plus two cups of liquid makes two standard loaves, or one very large one.
Bran and "entire wheat" breads are a familiar presence in American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s, driven less by taste than by the health writing of the day: whole-meal bread was promoted as a corrective to the refined white flour that roller milling had made cheap and universal. Metropolitan Life, which issued this book free to policyholders, had a direct interest in that argument, since the company's welfare division published dietary and hygiene advice as part of its effort to reduce mortality among the insured. The molasses is the older element here, a survival from the New England tradition of sweetening and darkening coarse-grain loaves that also produced brown bread and rye-and-Indian bread.