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Bread

Graham or Brown Bread

A yeast bread made with graham flour, white flour, molasses, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 or Brown Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Take 2 tablespoons of unbleached flour, salt, and lard; scald with enough boiling water to make a smooth batter.

  2. When cool, add the remaining unbleached flour, soda, and enough warm milk to make a stiff batter; mix in the yeast.

Rise and mix

  1. Let the mixture rise for about 3 hours or until very light.

  2. Add the meal, molasses, and white flour; if too stiff, add a little warm milk or water.

Bake

  1. Bake slowly until done.

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 + molassestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Molasses + milktop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

Unbolted flour
Provides structure from gluten, and its bran adds coarseness and a hearty texture.
White flour
Adds gluten for structure and a lighter crumb than the coarser flour.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture, dark colour and a robust flavour, and reacts with the soda.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide during the rise, which gives the bread its lift.
Soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses to release gas, helping the loaf rise and brown.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and keeps it from drying out.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture rise until very light. Yeast needs enough time to produce gas that leavens the dough. Coarse bran slows the rise, so stopping early leaves a dense loaf, while the batter must be stiff enough to hold the gas.

“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.

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