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Re: Making corn pone
Oh boy, I get to talk about the Grahamites! :D That's one of my pet subjects.
Graham flour is one kind of wheat flour. There's also white flour which is sifted (bolted) to remove the coarser parts of the wheat seed, there's Graham flour which contains all the wheat seed including the bran, there are some variations that are more or less sifted, and today there's also white flour that's been bleached (and/or enriched, etc.).
I'd say that white flour was the staple baking flour of the 1860s, and certainly of the earlier antebellum era, with Graham flour considered an alternative.
Graham flour--not a new invention, but something old that was newly popularized--was named for Sylvester Graham (1795-1851), who argued vigorously and annoyingly in the early 19th century that white flour was unhealthful, despite the fact that white flour was preferred and eaten by most people.
He wanted people to eat unbolted meal that included all of the wheat, including the bran, and not the finer white flour. In A Defense of the Graham System of Living, 1835, Graham writes, "The bread, made of flour from which all the bran has been separated, is that most commonly used, but bread, made of flour from which none of the bran has been separated, is the most wholesome." http://books.google.com/books?id=ODRlD83ww9IC&pg=PA135 He continues on the next page with quotes from various authorities saying that bread or flour containing bran was healthier than white bread.
He sounds reasonable enough there, but to see him really rant against white bread as an offense to God and man, check this out: http://books.google.com/books?id=uBUDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA523
But anyway, people started to listen and after a few decades most grudgingly agreed that Graham flour was more healthful than white flour, though they still generally preferred things made from the nicer-looking, milder-tasting white. Kinda like today, most folks admit that granola bars and carrots are a healthier snack, but reach for the Twinkies and cheese puffs anyway.
Advising poor people how to get the most for their money, Solon Robinson in How to Live, or Domestic Economy Illustrated, 1860, suggested that cracked wheat "and Graham flour should be used in preference, at the same price per pound, to white flour, because more healthy and more nutritious. One hundred pounds of Graham flour is worth full as much in a family as one hundred and thirty-three pounds of superfine white flour."
Graham had achieved success--his once crackpot ideas had seeped into the mainstream. Bread made from Graham flour was called brown bread, dyspepsia bread, since it supposedly helped indigestion, or bran bread. But it had those names because just plain "bread," to most people, meant "white bread."
The development of bleaching was a further step beyond bolting, toward making white flour look even whiter, for those who already preferred white flour and wanted it even more so. But Graham flour wasn't the only flour pre-1869. In fact, I think Graham would either be ecstatic, or turning over in his grave, to hear folks say that the flour he recommended was all that people ate in his day. :D
All the above is just my opinion, of course, based on my research. There were surely subsets of people who used Graham flour exclusively instead of white flour, even if not on a Graham diet by choice, because they had no access to a mill with good bolting cloth, though I'd expect that was fairly uncommon by the 1860s. If anyone has more info on that, I'd definitely be interested. Also, statistics on proportion of Graham vs. white flour produced by mills.
Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net
Originally posted by Terry Sorchy
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Graham flour is one kind of wheat flour. There's also white flour which is sifted (bolted) to remove the coarser parts of the wheat seed, there's Graham flour which contains all the wheat seed including the bran, there are some variations that are more or less sifted, and today there's also white flour that's been bleached (and/or enriched, etc.).
I'd say that white flour was the staple baking flour of the 1860s, and certainly of the earlier antebellum era, with Graham flour considered an alternative.
Graham flour--not a new invention, but something old that was newly popularized--was named for Sylvester Graham (1795-1851), who argued vigorously and annoyingly in the early 19th century that white flour was unhealthful, despite the fact that white flour was preferred and eaten by most people.
He wanted people to eat unbolted meal that included all of the wheat, including the bran, and not the finer white flour. In A Defense of the Graham System of Living, 1835, Graham writes, "The bread, made of flour from which all the bran has been separated, is that most commonly used, but bread, made of flour from which none of the bran has been separated, is the most wholesome." http://books.google.com/books?id=ODRlD83ww9IC&pg=PA135 He continues on the next page with quotes from various authorities saying that bread or flour containing bran was healthier than white bread.
He sounds reasonable enough there, but to see him really rant against white bread as an offense to God and man, check this out: http://books.google.com/books?id=uBUDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA523
But anyway, people started to listen and after a few decades most grudgingly agreed that Graham flour was more healthful than white flour, though they still generally preferred things made from the nicer-looking, milder-tasting white. Kinda like today, most folks admit that granola bars and carrots are a healthier snack, but reach for the Twinkies and cheese puffs anyway.
Advising poor people how to get the most for their money, Solon Robinson in How to Live, or Domestic Economy Illustrated, 1860, suggested that cracked wheat "and Graham flour should be used in preference, at the same price per pound, to white flour, because more healthy and more nutritious. One hundred pounds of Graham flour is worth full as much in a family as one hundred and thirty-three pounds of superfine white flour."
Graham had achieved success--his once crackpot ideas had seeped into the mainstream. Bread made from Graham flour was called brown bread, dyspepsia bread, since it supposedly helped indigestion, or bran bread. But it had those names because just plain "bread," to most people, meant "white bread."
The development of bleaching was a further step beyond bolting, toward making white flour look even whiter, for those who already preferred white flour and wanted it even more so. But Graham flour wasn't the only flour pre-1869. In fact, I think Graham would either be ecstatic, or turning over in his grave, to hear folks say that the flour he recommended was all that people ate in his day. :D
All the above is just my opinion, of course, based on my research. There were surely subsets of people who used Graham flour exclusively instead of white flour, even if not on a Graham diet by choice, because they had no access to a mill with good bolting cloth, though I'd expect that was fairly uncommon by the 1860s. If anyone has more info on that, I'd definitely be interested. Also, statistics on proportion of Graham vs. white flour produced by mills.
Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net
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