Graham Flour (with recipe)

            Graham flour is a whole wheat flour made from winter wheat. Similar to whole wheat pastry flour in the fineness of its grind, it usually contains more bran. The size of the bran granules will vary from mill to mill (the making of graham flour remains an individualized process in an age of standardization!). If a recipe calls for graham flour and there is none in the cupboard, whole wheat pastry flour can be substituted, cup for cup.

           

            The flour was named after Sylvester Graham, an American physician who in the early nineteenth century was already fighting for dietary reform. He chaffed against the horrors of useless white bread: Thousands of people, he said, “eat the most miserable trash that can be imagined, in the form of bread, and never seem to think that they can possibly have anything better, nor even that it is an evil to eat such vile stuff as they do”. And much of our bread has certainly gone downhill even from the “vileness” of Graham’s day! Graham also lent his name to the graham cracker, once a most nutritious item, now gone the way of all devitalized bakery products. Why not try stepping back in time to make your own?

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GRAHAM CRACKERS

8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter

²/₃ cup “raw” or brown sugar, firmly packed

2 cups graham flour

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ cup water

1.  Cream butter and sugar well. Sift together dry ingredients and add to creamed mixture, alternating with the water. Mix well. Let stand for 30 minutes.

2.      Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Oil a cookie sheet.

3.   Roll out dough on floured board to ¹/₈ – inch thickness. Cut in squares or rounds, and bake for about 20 minutes, or until lightly browned.

4.      Makes about three dozen.