Author Bibliography (in progress)
A Treatise on Bread and Bread Making (1837)
AUTHOR: Graham, Sylvester
https://archive.org/details/treatiseonbreadb00grah
KEYWORDS: food, Graham system, Graham bread, veg*ism
---. “The Candy Country”
Alcott, William. “The Graham System”
---. “What We May Eat”
---. The Young Mother
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson
---. A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity
---. Lectures on the Science of Human Life
---. The Aesculapian Tablets of the Nineteenth Century
Nicholson, Asenath. Nature’s Own Book
SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin; edited Deborah Madsen)
This treatise on bread and bread-making provides a short history of bread, a discussion of the best materials with which to make bread and the processes of making it in the context of what Graham's laws of diet, especially the properties of bread, the varieties of bread, and importantly, the question of who should be the primary bread-makers. Convinced that any food should be consumed in as natural a state as possible to preserve a healthy constitution, Graham promotes “the coarse unleavened bread of early times” (26). He decries the poor quality of wheat and flour, used by American bakers, which tends to contain unhealthy additives, so that “bakers' bread is very rarely a wholesome article of diet” (46) He is generally displeased with the quality of food and the dietary regime of most people in America, lamenting that “the people of our country are so entirely given up ... to gross and promiscuous feeding on the dead carcasses of animals” (35). In general, bread “which is made of superfine flour is always far less wholesome, in any and every situation of life, than that which is made of wheaten meal which contains all the natural properties of the grain” (51).
Graham gives detailed instructions on which materials to use in bread-making, how to clean and prepare them, and how to process them properly. “Proper materials,” he writes, “proper care, a due amount of labor, a suitable length of time, and proper temperature, are all, therefore, necessary to the making of good bread” (92). Graham is also convinced that “there is a far more intimate relation between the quality of the bread and the moral character of a family, than is generally supposed” (124). Thus, he thinks that the person best suited to make bread is the loving and caring mother, as “the quality of the bread must be uniformly excellent; and to secure this, I say again, there must be a judgment, an experience, a skill, a care, a vigilance, which can only spring from the sincere affections of a devoted wife and mother” (125).
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