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Boston Brown Bread
1 cupful rye meal 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful sugar 1 cupful cornmeal 1 cupful graham flour 3/4 tablespoonful baking soda 1/3 teaspoonful salt 3/4 cupful molasses 1 3/4 cupfuls sweet milk Mix and sift ingredients. Dissolve soda with one tablespoonful hot water, add to molasses, then add milk and mix with dry ingredients. Turn into greased mold two-thirds full, grease cover, and steam steadily three and a half hours. A 6-pound Crisco pail can be used for a mold.
Sufficient for one loaf.
A steamed loaf, not a baked one, and the long gentle steam is what gives it the dark, moist, almost pudding-like crumb. Everything else is straightforward once the vessel and the water bath are sorted.
- Keep the water simmering, never boiling dryThe hinge of the recipe is "steam steadily" for three and a half hours. Set the covered mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up its side, keep it at a bare simmer, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates. A dry pot in hour three scorches the loaf and can warp the mold.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured whole milk. The term distinguished it from buttermilk or clabbered milk, which were also in kitchen use and would have reacted differently with the soda.
- Graham flour and rye mealGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour; ordinary whole wheat works. Rye meal is coarsely ground whole rye, sold today as medium or dark rye flour or as rye meal at a natural-foods store.
- The soda measureThree-quarters of a tablespoon is about 2 1/4 teaspoons, which is a lot of soda for four cups of dry ingredients. It is there to neutralise the acid molasses, so do not increase it. Dissolving it in hot water and stirring it into the molasses first, as directed, prevents streaks of bitterness.
- CriscoThis book was written to sell shortening, hence the two tablespoons. Any solid vegetable shortening, or melted butter, does the same work. Rub or cut it into the dry mixture before adding the liquids.
- The moldA 6-pound Crisco pail held roughly three quarts. Use a 3-quart pudding mold or a well-greased 3-quart metal bowl covered with greased foil tied down with string. Modern coated food cans are not made to be heated repeatedly and are best avoided. Two-thirds full is not a suggestion; the loaf rises considerably.
- Testing and finishingA skewer to the centre should come out clean and the loaf should pull slightly from the sides. Let it stand five to ten minutes, unmold, and dry the surface in a 300F oven for ten minutes if it feels tacky.
- Yield and servingOne loaf. Cut it warm with a length of thread or dental floss drawn through rather than a knife, which drags the sticky crumb. Traditionally it goes with baked beans, butter, or cream cheese.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England tradition of cooking in a covered pot rather than an oven, which suited both the open hearth and the thrifty use of whatever meal was on hand: rye, cornmeal, and whatever wheat was available, sweetened with molasses from the West Indies trade. The older name for the rye-and-cornmeal version was "rye and Injun," and the dish is inseparable in Boston custom from Saturday-night baked beans, which could sit unattended while the household observed the Sabbath. This particular version comes from a promotional cookbook issued to demonstrate uses for vegetable shortening, which explains the two tablespoons of Crisco and the suggestion that its shipping pail be pressed into service as a mold; the older recipes for the bread generally contain no fat at all.