Mrs. Roundell's Practical cookery book

Sir Henry Thompson’s Bread.— Sir Henry Thompson has long advocated the use of whole wheat meal — that is the entire grain of the wheat without the removal of any portion of the husk. It should not, however, be too coarsely ground ; the best size is when the meal will pass through an eighteen-inch wire sieve. Sir Henry Thompson adds butter and milk to his bread, in order to supply the fatty matter in which wheat is somewhat deficient, and he maintains that a more nutritive form of bread than his cannot be made. It cannot, however, be made up into loaves, as the whole meal is a bad conductor of heat, and the outside of a loaf made of it would be as hard as flint if the inside were “ set.” Whole meal bread must therefore be made into flat cakes not thicker than half an inch, and seven or eight inches in diameter, and baked in rings or hoops. Either yeast or baking-powder can be used. For whole meal bread made with baking powder : Take two pounds of coarsely-ground whole wheat meal, and add half a pound of fine flour, or, better still, the same weight or more if preferred of fine Scotch oatmeal. Mix thoroughly with a sufficient quantity of bakingpowder and a little salt ; * then rub in two ounces of butter and make into dough — using a wooden spoon — with cold skimmed milk or milk and water ; soft in consistence, so that it can almost be poured into the tin ring which gives it form when baked. Set the rings on a tin and put them without delay into a quick oven at the outset, letting them be finished thoroughly at a lower temperature. If the bread is made with yeast, which, as Sir Henry Thompson says, is preferable for general purposes, the milk and water must be used warm, and the cakes set near the fire to rise for about an hour. Bake in a medium oven. Medium coarse oatmeal may be used in this * Half an ounce of baking powder and a saltspoonful of salt to every pound of meal. M M 53° case instead of the fine oatmeal which is necessary with bakingpowder. [ Food and Feeding, page 42.] One of the best London bakers, who is in the habit of supplying Sir Henry Thompson’s Bread, kindly gave me his recipe for making it, which I have found most useful. Six pounds whole meal, a pound and a half fine oatmeal, three quarts water, four ounces yeast, six ounces butter. Prove twenty minutes. Put into hoops. Prove again twenty minutes. Good sound heat. (Of course all these quantities can be reduced in proportion.) There is no better baking-powder than Sir Henry Thompson’s, which can be made up by any chemist. Take two ounces of tartaric acid, three ounces of bicarbonate of soda, and three ounces of arrowroot. Mix well, place in a wide-mouthed corked bottle, and keep perfectly dry. The arrowroot has not the sweet taste of the ground rice so often used in bakingpowders. It is the combination of the tartaric acid and the alkali of the soda which makes bubbles of carbonic acid gas similar in effect to those produced by the fermentation of the yeast-plant.