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Excellent Graham Bread
2 cupfuls graham flour 4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco ½ cupful flour 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1½ cupfuls sour milk 1/4 cupful sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful baking soda Sift flours with baking powder, salt, sugar, and soda, then add Crisco and milk. Mix and turn into greased and floured cake tin and bake in moderate oven fifty minutes.
Sufficient for one small loaf.
A quick bread rather than a yeast loaf: the rise comes entirely from soda reacting with sour milk, so the batter goes into the pan and into the oven without delay.
- Ignore the last line"1 egg 1 cupful sugar 1½ cupful Crisco" appears to be stray type carried over from an adjacent recipe; it plays no part in the method here, which names no egg. The graham bread uses only the ingredients above it.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F (175C), the usual modern reading of the term. Fifty minutes is right for a single small loaf; a skewer should come out clean and the loaf sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but deliberately clabbered milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the direct modern equivalent, or add 1½ tablespoons lemon juice or white vinegar to 1½ cups whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- Graham flourCoarse-ground whole wheat flour, milled with the bran and germ left in. Ordinary whole wheat flour works; stone-ground gives the closer texture. The 1½ cups of plain "flour" is white all-purpose.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening, melted and cooled slightly before it goes in so it does not seize in the cold sour milk. Melted butter or a neutral oil will both work, with butter giving more flavour.
- Both leavenersThe soda is neutralised by the sour milk; the teaspoon of baking powder is insurance for lift. Sift them through with the flours as directed rather than dumping them in, or the crumb will carry bitter pockets.
- Mix brieflyStir only until the dry flour disappears. Overbeating toughens the crumb, and this is a batter bread, not a dough.
- The tin"Cake tin" here means any small loaf or round pan; an 8x4-inch loaf pan suits the quantity. Grease and flour it as written, since whole-grain batters stick.
- YieldOne small loaf, roughly ten slices. Best the day it is baked, and good toasted after that.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it; recipes like this one exist to demonstrate that the new shortening could stand in for butter or lard in everyday baking. Graham flour itself was already old news by then, named for Sylvester Graham, the temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who campaigned for coarse unsifted wheat meal as a moral as well as physical corrective to refined white bread. By the 1910s his name had detached from his crusade and survived simply as a shorthand for whole wheat.