Summer camping requires a round of S'mores just as much as it requires bug spray and sun block. So while we dine on that ubiquitous sandwich of chocolate and marshmallow, now is as good a time as any to look at the origin of the packaging for all those camp-fire memories -- graham crackers.
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Graham crackers resulted from Sylvester Graham's active crusade touting whole-grain and organic foods. (John Beale, Post-Gazette) |
Their inventor, Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), was a Connecticut cleric, a social reformer and a ferocious advocate of healthful living. Central to healthful living was healthful eating, and central to healthful eating was anything that kept the digestive tract moving right along at a brisk pace.
Graham's flour, a whole wheat flour rich with the bran of the wheat kernel, purported to do just this. Graham was an early champion of whole, organic, raw food and felt that the more whole grains and fibers in the American diet, the better. In keeping with this attitude was his rejection of highly spiced foods and anything having to do with alcohol.
His crusade commenced in 1830 and quickly gained thousands of adherents.
Grahamites, as they were called, were called upon to live their lives as vegetarians -- Graham compared humans to orangutans and concluded that humans should follow the orangutan example in avoiding meat.
Beyond this, Grahamites were exhorted to wear loose clothing, partake of moderate exercise, take frequent baths and avoid sexual intimacy as much as possible. Graham even forbade his followers to drink "marketplace milk," asking instead that they get their milk directly from individual dairy farmers. Milk sold in cities was unfit for drinking, he felt, because the cows of the dairy concerns providing larger marketplaces had been fed on leftover corn mash from liquor distilleries.
Graham set up Graham hotels and Graham camps, all of which served nutritionally balanced, carefully portioned meals at specific hours. There was a great fear of any foods "inflaming the blood," which was thought to cause all manner of illnesses. The settings were rigidly controlled, as Graham looked on his paying guests as participants in a grand experiment.
Not everyone applauded Graham's theories. Once, when he appeared in Boston to give a speech, a group of enraged local bakers protested his appearance. Certainly they felt that his influence and his embrace of healthful living threatened their butter-sugar-and-eggs-based livelihood.
The graham cracker is the lone survivor of Graham's crusade. Invented in 1882, this flat, slightly sweet cookie was a favorite of both children and adults. Many 19th-century cookbooks included recipes for making both it and other edibles calling for the use of graham flour.
Graham flour is essentially the same as whole wheat flour -- that is, flour that has been minimally processed and ground from the entire wheat kernel (bran, germ and endosperm). It is coarse in texture and heavy for use in baked goods -- don't try substituting it completely for the flour a recipe calls for, although in many recipes you can get away with using about 25 percent whole wheat flour in place of all-purpose flour. And don't confuse graham flour with gram flour -- the latter is made of ground chickpeas.
You can use whole wheat flour, or you can purchase honest-to-goodness Graham flour via a Web site called www.SugarFreeKitchen.com They sell the Hodgson's Mills brand at $3.38 for a 5-pound bag (some grocery stores carry it). Sylvester Graham would be proud to see that Hodgson's Mills makes it with "no preservatives, artificial colors or enrichments."
Sylvester Graham would probably not be thrilled, however, to hear about the invention of that favorite camping treat, the S'more. It is so named because after eating one, you immediately crave "S'more." No one knows for sure who invented this gooey concoction, though the first known recipe appeared in the 1927 edition of "Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts." It's simply toasted marshmallows and a slab of chocolate, sandwiched between two graham crackers.
Nabisco produces 50 million packages of graham crackers a year to meet the demand for after-school snacks, S'mores and countless pie crusts. The flour comes from choice winter wheat berries ground to a coarse powder. The coarseness gives both hearty texture and a slightly nutty flavor to the finished product.
Modern tastes have intervened, and the crackers are not what Sylvester Graham originally developed. Graham flour is only fourth on the list of ingredients, and the crackers are not particularly high in fiber anymore. Nabisco's crackers are now called Honey Maid Grahams, with the name "Graham" making only the tiniest of appearances on the front of the box. Still, they are an echo of a health food movement in which Sylvester Graham played a starring role 150 years ago.
Let us now praise graham crackers.
The Chilled S'Mores Tart recipe and others can be viewed at Catherine S. Vodrey's Web site at www.WordBanquet.com The free-lance writer lives in East Liverpool, Ohio.
Related Recipes:
Basic Graham Cracker Pie Crust
Chilled S'Mores Tart
S'More Napoleon
Graham Crackers
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