Home › Bread › Graham Bread (Two cupfuls sour milk one-half)
Graham Bread (Two cupfuls sour milk one-half)
Two cupfuls sour milk, one-half cupful molasses or brown sugar, two cupfuls graham flour, one cupful white flour, one teaspoonful soda, one teaspoonful of salt. Bake immediately.
A soda-raised quick bread with no yeast and no kneading — closer to a batter bread than a loaf you shape. The whole thing depends on getting it into a hot oven before the soda spends itself.
- "Bake immediately" is the hingeThe only leavening is soda reacting with the acid in the sour milk, and that reaction begins the moment the two meet. Have the pan greased and the oven already at temperature before you combine wet and dry, or the loaf will be dense and flat.
- Sour milkThis meant raw milk left to clabber naturally, which no longer happens safely with pasteurised milk. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, two cups of milk with two tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour ground with the bran and germ intact, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole-wheat flour is the nearest thing; ordinary whole-wheat works but gives a finer crumb.
- No oven givenThe recipe specifies no temperature. For a quick bread of this size a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern starting point.
- Pan and timeThe batter will roughly half-fill a standard loaf pan; a smaller pan (about 8x4) suits it better. Reckon on somewhere around 45 to 55 minutes, testing with a skewer.
- Molasses or brown sugarMolasses is itself acidic and darkens the crumb considerably; brown sugar gives a milder, lighter loaf. Half a cup is on the sweet side by modern quick-bread standards; reducing it will affect the rise slightly if molasses is the sweetener, since some of the acid the soda needs goes with it.
- ConsistencyThe proportions give a thick, pourable batter rather than a dough. Do not add flour to stiffen it — graham flour absorbs liquid slowly and the batter will thicken in the pan.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf, about twelve slices. It stales quickly, as soda breads do; it is best the day it is baked and good toasted the day after.
Graham bread takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer whose 1830s campaign against refined white flour urged Americans back to coarse, unbolted wheat. His followers baked a plain yeast loaf, but by the end of the century "graham" had become simply a flour designation, and cookbooks like this one attached it to quick breads raised with soda — faster, cheaper and requiring no yeast on hand. The recipe's reliance on sour milk reflects a kitchen where milk soured on its own schedule and cooks found uses for it rather than pouring it out; the pairing of clabbered milk with soda was the standard American leavening before commercial baking powder became universal, and it survived in whole-grain breads long after white loaves had moved on.