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Boston Brown Bread
2 Cups Indian Meal, 2 cups Graham Flour, ½ cup Coarse Rye Flour, 1 cup Wheat Flour, 3 rounded teaspoonfuls The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda or Saleratus. 2 teaspoonfuls Salt, 1 cup Molasses, 2 cups Buttermilk, 1½ cups Water.
Sift together two cups of Indian Meal, two cups Graham Flour, 1/2 cup Coarse Rye flour, one cup Wheat Flour, two teaspoonfuls Salt. Take one cup Molasses and two cups Buttermilk, one and a half cups Water, in which dissolve three rounded teaspoonfuls of The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda (or saleratus). Mix all into a soft dough (a little more water may have to be added). Pour into Brown-bread moulds with covers, which must be well greased.
Bake in a deep pan into which has been poured hot water about one inch deep. Water should be all evaporated after two hours, then bake about a half hour longer, according to size of loaves. If you can bake in a closed steamer, the loaves will be moist and the crust more tender. Small lard pails with covers make good molds in which to steam Brown Bread.
A steam-then-bake brown bread from a soda maker's promotional pamphlet, so the leavening is deliberately generous. Two things need sorting before you start: the rye measurement contradicts itself, and no oven temperature is given.
- The rye discrepancyThe ingredient list calls for 1½ cups coarse rye flour, the method for ½ cup. The four-grain proportions read more evenly with 1½ cups; ½ cup gives a softer, cornmeal-forward loaf. Either works, but decide before you mix, since the liquid will need adjusting to match.
- Indian meal and Graham flourIndian meal is cornmeal, ideally a medium or coarse stone-ground yellow. Graham flour is coarse whole-wheat with the bran left in; ordinary whole-wheat flour is the closest substitute. "Wheat flour" here means plain white flour.
- SaleratusSaleratus was the older name for a chemical leavener: originally potassium bicarbonate, though by the later nineteenth century the word was often used for sodium bicarbonate, which is what the recipe's "Soda (or saleratus)" implies. Three rounded teaspoons is a lot, but there is a cup of molasses and two cups of buttermilk, both acidic, to react with it. Measure it level-plus-a-little rather than heaped, or the loaf will taste soapy.
- Dissolve the soda in the liquidThe instruction to dissolve the soda in the water, not sift it with the flours, is the hinge. Combine the wet and dry mixtures quickly and get the loaves into their moulds without delay; the reaction starts as soon as soda meets buttermilk and molasses.
- The mouldsTraditional brown-bread moulds are tall cylinders with clamped lids. Empty coffee tins or 1 lb tinned-fruit cans work, covered tightly with greased foil and tied. Fill each mould no more than two-thirds; the batter climbs considerably. Grease heavily.
- Oven temperatureNone is given anywhere in the recipe. A moderate oven, around 325F, is a reasonable modern equivalent: while the inch of hot water in the pan lasts, the covered moulds are effectively in a bain-marie, and the final half hour sets and lightly crusts the outside.
- The steamer optionSteaming throughout, as the recipe offers at the end, gives what it describes as a moister loaf with a more tender crust, and a darker, almost puddingy crumb. Allow roughly 2½ to 3 hours in a covered steamer, topping up the boiling water, and test with a skewer.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield, saying only "according to size of loaves"; the quantities will fill roughly two large or three medium moulds. Because the loaves are steamed in cylinders they are cut in rounds rather than slices, and eaten warm with butter, or alongside baked beans.
Boston brown bread belongs to a New England tradition of steamed rather than oven-baked breads, built on cornmeal and rye because those were the grains a colonial household could grow and grind while wheat flour was scarce and expensive. Molasses, arriving in quantity through the New England rum and sugar trade, supplied both sweetness and some of the acidity that soda needs, and the pairing with Saturday-night baked beans is long-standing. Earlier breads of this type were commonly raised with yeast; soda and saleratus were the quicker alternative, which is why a soda maker had an interest in printing the recipe. The Arm & Hammer mark dates from the later 1860s and was carried on by Church & Dwight, which distributed booklets like this one to keep the packet on the shelf, and the insistence on "The Great" brand at every mention of soda is the price of the free recipe.