Graham Date Bread (1893)

From Science in the Kitchen, 1893

The Story Behind This Recipe

A kitchen turned laboratory

Ella Eaton finished college at nineteen. She graduated from Alfred in 1872, in the New York town where she was born in 1853, and the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame records her as the youngest person to earn a bachelor’s degree there. Nursing typhoid patients during a stay in Battle Creek drew her into hygiene work, and in February 1879 she married Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium. His patients often balked at the meatless diet, so she turned a kitchen into a laboratory. The Sanitarium Experimental Kitchen dates to 1884. It grew into a School of Domestic Economy, and its cooking students went on to teach others.

Her work reached the public as Science in the Kitchen. Some sources date it to 1892, while the Culinary Institute of America’s library describes the 1893 edition and says she wrote it to guide housewives toward food that was ‘morally correct’ as well as nutritionally sound. The Paris Review calls it less a cookbook than a manual for feeding the body. Digestion and kitchen order come first, then several hundred pages of grains, nuts, legumes and vegetables. Her husband later wrote that hundreds of her dishes had made their way into everyday cookbooks and newspaper household columns.

Three threads in one loaf

Start with the flour. Graham flour is whole wheat ground coarse and left unsifted. It is named for Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), a diet reformer who objected to millers stripping away the bran and germ, so it was the obvious choice for a health-reform kitchen. Then comes the method. Kellogg begins with a pint of ‘light white bread sponge prepared with milk,’ the first half of the old two-step sponge-and-dough process, and stiffens it with Graham flour and a sparing two tablespoons of sugar. Last come the dates. According to a University of Texas history doctoral candidate, Americans took to them in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Nobody in the United States grew them commercially yet, so they were shipped in from the Middle East.

Food historian David S. Shields places the better-known American date nut bread in 1917–1918, as a wartime novelty. One newspaper promoted a half-Graham, half-white version as good for the war effort. Kellogg’s yeast-raised loaf is a different bread, and it appeared in print a full generation earlier.

Dates by the boxful

A cook following this recipe in the 1890s had a chore to do first: stoning the dates. Shields notes that the Dromedary company’s pitted, packaged dates arrived only in 1910, at 10 cents a package. Before that, many dates sat loose in great open boxes, where, as the company’s ads put it, they ‘dried and hardened and shriveled.’ The flour also called for a careful shopper. Both before and after the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, sellers often passed off white flour mixed with wheat middlings as Graham.

Dates also followed the calendar. Shields writes that many grocers stocked them only from about October through March, and that the date nut bar was a holiday-season treat for much of the twentieth century. None of our sources ties this particular loaf to Christmas. Still, a fruit bread made with a cold-season import fits well on a holiday baking table. In the 1890s every date in it still arrived by ship, since Southern California’s Coachella Valley became the leading growing region only in the early twentieth century.