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Steamed Graham
1/4 cup Mazola 3/4 cup Karo 34 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt remove from the pan. Serve with afternoon tea.
This entry has come down to us badly damaged: what survives is the liquid side of a steamed graham bread, with the flour, leavening and steaming time all missing. Treat it as a record rather than a working formula, and read the notes below before attempting anything with it.
- What is missingThere is no graham flour, no soda or baking powder, and no steaming time — the three things that would make this reproducible. The stray "34" is almost certainly a page number or a fragment of a quantity that dropped out of the text.
- MazolaCorn oil, and still sold under that name. A quarter cup of any neutral oil is the equivalent; in a steamed batter it behaves much as melted butter would, though it will not contribute flavour.
- KaroCorn syrup. Karo was sold in both light and dark grades; the fragment does not say which was meant, and dark corn syrup carries some molasses character while the light is blander. Three-quarters of a cup is a heavily sweetened batter, typical of steamed brown breads.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, milled to include the bran and germ. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing on a supermarket shelf; ordinary whole-wheat flour is finer but will work.
- Steaming, in generalBatters of this family go into a greased mould filled no more than two-thirds, covered tightly, and set on a rack in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the mould. Two to three hours is usual, with water topped up as it boils away — but this particular recipe gives no time at all, so any figure is inference.
- "Remove from the pan"Steamed breads are turned out hot and left to stand a few minutes so the surface steam escapes; left in the mould to cool they sweat and go gummy.
- ServingThe instruction to serve it with afternoon tea suggests something closer to a sweet brown bread than a pudding — sliced thin and buttered; steamed loaves slice more cleanly once cooled.
Both branded ingredients here come from the same company: Mazola corn oil and Karo corn syrup were products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and small cookery booklets promoting them circulated widely in American kitchens in the early twentieth century. That explains why a steamed graham bread — a dish that in older New England practice would have been sweetened with molasses and enriched with butter — appears with corn syrup and corn oil in their place. Steamed breads themselves are much older, a legacy of hearth and stovetop cooking in households without dependable ovens: the loaf cooks in a covered mould over boiling water, emerging dense, moist and dark. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the nineteenth-century American dietary reformer who preached unbolted wheat, and the word had become a general grocery term for coarse whole-wheat meal long before this book was printed.