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New England Lunch Bread
2 cups Yellow Meal, 1 cup White Flour, 1 teaspoonful Salt, 1 pt. sweet Milk, 2/3rds cup Molasses, 1 rounded teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda.
Sift together the yellow meal, white flour and the salt. Dissolve one rounded teaspoonful salt . Dissolve one rounded teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda in one third cup warm water, and pour to one pint sweet milk and two thirds cup molasses. Then stir milk gradually into flour and mix all thoroughly. Put this stiff batter into deep moulds (well greased and flour dusted) and steam in a water bath from 5 to 6 hours.
A steamed brown bread of the plainest New England kind, printed to sell baking soda. The text has a printer's slip in it; the duplicated "Dissolve one rounded teaspoonful salt" is an accident of typesetting, and the salt simply goes in with the dry ingredients.
- The hinge: steam, never bakeThe batter cooks in moist heat the whole time. The original specifies only deep, greased and floured moulds set in a water bath; covering the mould and keeping the water partway up the sides is modern practice. Check the water level and top up with boiling water so the pot does not boil dry.
- Yellow mealPlain yellow cornmeal, stone-ground if you have it. It is not corn flour, masa or self-rising cornmeal mix.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for. Whole milk gives the best texture.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cane molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than what was sold as cooking molasses and will dull the flavour; its acidity is also reported as lower, which may give the soda less to work against.
- MouldsDeep cylindrical tins were standard; two well-greased 1-lb coffee tins or a 2-quart pudding basin work. Fill no more than two-thirds and cover tightly with greased foil, tied down, so condensation does not drip onto the loaf.
- TimeThe original gives five to six hours, though it says moulds, plural, so that time may already assume more than one. In two 1-lb tins expect roughly 2 1/2 to 3 hours: a skewer comes out clean and the centre reads about 200F.
- FinishingThe loaf will not brown or crust in the steamer. Uncovering and setting the tins in a moderate oven for about ten minutes to dry the surface is a modern addition, not in the original; then turn out while warm.
- Yield and servingRoughly two 1-lb loaves. Cut with a taut string or serrated knife rather than pressing down with a blade, and serve warm with butter, or in the customary way alongside baked beans.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England tradition older than baking powder: cornmeal and a little wheat or rye, sweetened with molasses, leavened chemically and cooked for hours in a covered mould over water -- an approach usually explained by the ready availability of a hearth kettle. The version made with cornmeal, rye and wheat in equal parts was known as thirds bread, and the whole family of them is generally traced to the colonial reliance on Indian meal and on West Indies molasses, which arrived in New England ports in enormous quantity. This particular recipe appears to come from one of the promotional booklets Church & Dwight distributed with Arm & Hammer soda from the late nineteenth century onward: cheap pamphlets of household recipes in which the branded ingredient is named in full, capitalised, every time it appears. The soda is doing real work here rather than merely advertising, since molasses is acidic enough to react with it.