Skip to main content
Main

Graham Bread

A loaf made from graham flour, sour milk, lard, eggs, sugar, baking soda, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Graham Bread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Melt the lard and set aside.

Make and shape the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine the graham flour, salt, sour milk, baking soda, sugar, and beaten eggs.

  2. Add the melted lard to the mixture and stir until well combined.

  3. Mould the dough into two loaves and place in a baking pan.

Bake

  1. Bake for about 1 hour or until golden brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Graham flour
Provides the bulk and structure of the loaves, with a coarse, nutty texture.
Sour milk
Supplies moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to lift the bread.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acid to release carbon dioxide, helping the loaves rise.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure as they set in the oven.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and keeps the loaves moist.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.

The step that matters

Stirring in the baking soda with the sour milk. Baking soda needs an acid to react with, and the sour milk supplies it. Mixing it evenly into the batter spreads the gas bubbles through the dough so the loaves rise uniformly instead of in patches.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More graham bread recipes

Steamed 18Quick 13 See all 389 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes