A HARTE APPETITE; 'THE PROPHET OF BRAN BREAD'

Graham crackers, developed by Sylvester Graham in 1829, have become a staple in many American homes.

Life is full of ironies, and the culinary world is no exception. Take graham crackers, for instance. Developed in 1829 by Sylvester Graham, the nation's first health nut, as a whole grain alternative to baked goods made with refined flour, they are now the most common base for cheesecake, a concoction which the fitness-minded Graham would have no doubt railed against.

It is no accident that this country should have produced a diet fanatic such as Graham, for, as Dennis Roth, writing in Food Review, points out, "No other country has had our variegated history of nutritional theories, diets, food fads, and, more recently, eating disorders." Europeans by and large eat for enjoyment, he argues, but Americans have a long-standing concern for nutrition and health.

Partly this is because we sometimes feel further removed from the sources of our food supply and therefore more suspicious of them than they are in other countries. The United States, after all, was the first continental market where food products could be shipped over thousands of miles.

Then too, our very bounty sometimes conspires against us. As the country became more urbanized and its citizens more sedentary, unlike other counties we had to actually begin to curb our appetites in the face of abundant food supplies. The political climate has also played a role, Roth says, noting that nutritional reforms often coincide with political ones.

Finally, there is what he calls our frontier-honed ethos of self-improvement. As Charles Tart, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis, puts it, "Americans have the delusion that we can eat our way to enlightenment." It is perhaps no wonder, then, that this country should have spawned a character like Sylvester Graham, a man Bee Wilson in an article in the New Statesman calls the father of all modern diet crazes. His legacy, according to Frederick Kaufman, in a review of several diet books for Harper's Magazine, can still be felt in prescriptions such as the Pritikin diet and SUGAR BUSTERS!

Sylvester Graham, by any account, was something of an eccentric. For example, among his beliefs about nutrition were the notions that ketchup could cause insanity and that cholera was the result of chicken pie and excessive lewdness. (Apparently either was a sufficient cause.)

Born on July 4, 1794, in West Suffield, Conn., he was one of 17 children. His father, a local minister who was 72 at the time of his birth, died two years later, leaving Graham and his mother to the care of relatives in New Jersey. He attended Amherst Academy for a while, but was expelled on a false charge trumped up by classmates who were turned off by his egotistical personality. (In later life he bragged that he never read books and perfected his theories completely on his own.) Studying with a private tutor, he was eventually ordained and before long was lecturing for the Pennsylvania Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits. A compelling speaker, he lectured to packed houses up and down the East Coast, often getting paid as much as $300 per night, the equivalent of thousands in today's dollars.

Though derided by some (Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, called him "the prophet of bran bread and pumpkins" and some newspapers dubbed him "a nut among the crackers"), Graham developed quite a following. Grahamite hotels, serving only meals that followed his dietary prescriptions, sprang up to serve his disciples. Special stores opened to sell his graham (whole-wheat) flour and later graham crackers, which became a New England fad. Oberlin College for a time required all students to subsist on a diet of only Graham crackers and water. Some of Graham's converts included, at least temporarily, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Greeley and Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. His influence is still felt in part on Seventh Day Adventists and Christian Scientists. The Kellogg brothers took some of his ideas and created the cold cereal industry. (Grahamites invented the first cold cereal, Granula, made of crumbled graham crackers.)

Graham compared humans to orangutans and concluded that a vegetarian diet was best for both of them. In his regimen spices, including salt and pepper, were forbidden. So were butter, cream, tobacco, coffee, tea, molasses, honey, fish, mustard, sugar and warm food. Even soup was to be avoided.

He also preached daily tooth brushing, fresh air, exercise, seven hours of sleep on hard beds and regular cold baths. (Graham would occasionally walk to a river near his home to take a dip, strolling down the street sporting only a bathrobe.)

But the cornerstone of Graham's system was that whole grain, not white, bread should be the mainstay of the diet and it should be home-baked, not store bought. Not surprisingly, this edict did not endear Graham to the professional bakers of his day. Along with butchers who, understandably, were likewise not enamored of Grahamite vegetarianism, they staged a riot outside a Boston hotel during one of Graham's lectures.

Graham didn't stick just to advice about food. He believed that anything "stimulating" was injurious to health, including alcohol and what he called sexual excess, a consequence, he contended, of eating fats. He argued that men should remain virgins until the age of 30 and once married should have sex only once a month. In his famous "Lecture to Young Men" he warned against "lascivious day-dreams" and he invented the graham cracker because he thought its ingredients would reduce lust and tame teenage hormones, particularly in young girls.

Well, at least he appears to have been right about whole grains. Recent studies indicate that women who consume mostly refined grains have a 16 percent higher likelihood of early death compared to those who regularly eat whole grains. Apparently Graham's other theories have not been as rigorously tested, owing, I suspect, to a lack of willing experimental subjects.

For all his abstinence from the good things in life, Graham, whose Massachusetts home is now a very ungraham-like restaurant, died at the rather young age of 56. And though in retrospect some people view him as a crackpot, he nonetheless left his mark on the American diet, even if it clearly wasn't the mark he had intended. His namesake crackers can now be found everywhere, not just in so-called health food stores. Ben and Jerry put them in their ice cream, Russell Stover makes a candy concoction out of them, and there's even a honey graham cracker Jelly Belly.

And, of course, legions of Girl Scouts, oblivious to the cracker's origins, devour them around the campfire with toasted marshmallows and chocolate.

John Steele Gordon, writing in American Heritage, claims that Graham inadvertently created the American diet-fad industry. Maybe so. But surely his graham cracker is a far better legacy. The following recipes are delicious ways to celebrate it.

Home Made Graham Crackers

Though Nabisco has for years been manufacturing graham crackers based on Sylvester Graham's recipe, sometimes, when the Martha Stewart bug bites, it's nice to make your own. This version is adapted from one printed in Highlights for Children Magazine.

Ingredients:

6 tablespoons butter

2/3 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup honey

1/2 cup yogurt

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 cups whole-wheat flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions:

Cream together butter and sugar. Blend in honey, yogurt and vanilla. Stir together remaining dry ingredients and combine with butter mixture. Roll between sheets of waxed paper to 1/8-inch thickness. Place on floured cookie sheet, score into squares, and prick with a fork. Bake at 350 degrees until golden, about 8 minutes.

Graham Cracker Streusel Cake

This recipe is a variation of one on allrecipes.com, an Internet recipe site. It can be made in a 9x13 pan, but I think the Bundt version is more attractive.

Ingredients:

1 1/3 cups graham cracker crumbs

3/4 cup chopped nuts

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

2/3 cup melted butter

1 package yellow cake mix (18.5 oz)

1 cup water

1/4 cup oil

3 eggs

Directions:

Combine crumbs, nuts, brown sugar, and cinnamon. Stir in melted butter. Combine cake mix, water, oil, and eggs and beat for 2 minutes. Place half of streusel mixture around bottom of greased Bundt pan. Spread half of cake batter over top, sprinkle with remaining streusel, and cover with remaining batter. Bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes or until cake tests clean. Cool 15 minutes before removing from pan. Drizzle with frosting if desired. Serves 12-16.

Sawdust Pie

This recipe gets its name from the fact that crushed graham crackers are the texture of sawdust. (Sylvester Graham's hometown newspaper, in fact, called him "the philosopher of sawdust pudding.") The dessert is a staple at Patti's restaurant in Grand Rivers, Ky., where they really know how to do pies. The recipe first appeared nearly twenty years ago in Bon Appetit magazine and though the original did not specify cinnamon flavored graham crackers, I think they give the pie a nice touch. (Chocolate grahams might be an interesting variation as well.)

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 1/2 cups coconut

1 1/2 cups chopped pecans

1 1/2 cups cinnamon graham cracker crumbs

7 egg whites

1 unbaked 10-inch pie shell

1 banana, sliced thinly

whipped cream

Directions:

Combine sugar, coconut, pecans, crumbs, and egg whites and mix well without beating. Turn into pie shell and bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes or until just set. Top with whipped cream and banana slices.

Listen to A Harte Appetite every Saturday at 11:59 a.m. following "Whad'ya Know" on KRCU, 90.9 on your FM dial. Send suggestions for this column to A Harte Appetite, c/o The Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699 or by e-mail to tharte@semovm.semo.edu.