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Rye and Meal Bread
1 cup Rye Meal, 1 cup Indian Meal, ½ cup Bread Flour, 1 heaping teaspoonful Salt, 1 cup Buttermilk, 1/4 cup Cold Water, 1 heaping teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 1/2 cup Molasses.
Sift together the rye meal and Indian meal with a half cup Bread flour and a heaping teaspoonful of Salt. In one cup of Buttermilk and a quarter cup of water (cold) dissolve one heaping teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda, and add half cup molasses, stirring all the liquid well together. Add the meal gradually, beating the mixture with a large spoon or ladle. The adding of a spoonful or two of melted butter improves the flavor and tenderness.
This batter should be soft enough so you can just about pour it into the pan or tin, which must be greased. Set into steamer and steam for about three hours, then bake for a half hour longer in oven to give it a good crust.
A New England steamed brown bread, leavened entirely by soda reacting with buttermilk and molasses. The recipe is workable as written, with one internal contradiction in the ingredient list worth sorting out before you start.
- The flour discrepancyThe list calls for 1½ cups bread flour; the method sifts in only half a cup. The batter described — soft enough to just about pour — is closer to the half-cup version with these liquids. If you use the full 1½ cups you will need to loosen the batter with additional buttermilk.
- Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal. Stone-ground medium cornmeal gives the right texture; do not substitute corn flour or masa.
- Rye mealCoarser than modern rye flour and closer to a whole-grain pumpernickel or dark rye meal. Ordinary dark rye flour works; light or white rye will make a paler, blander loaf.
- The soda is the whole leaveningThere is no yeast and no baking powder. Mix the soda into the buttermilk and water, add the molasses, then combine with the dry meals and get the batter into the greased mould promptly — the gas begins escaping as soon as acid meets soda.
- The pan and the steamerTraditionally a 1-lb coffee tin or a covered pudding mould, greased and filled no more than two-thirds to leave rising room. Cover the top with greased foil or a lid so condensation does not drip in, and stand it on a rack in a deep pot with water reaching halfway up the mould.
- Keep the water goingThree hours of steaming means three hours of gentle boil. Check the water level every 45 minutes and top up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry and the temperature never drops.
- The oven finishHalf an hour in the oven to dry and firm the crust. The recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, will do. The bread is already cooked through by then; a skewer should come out clean before it goes in.
- YieldMore than a single 1-lb tin will hold; divide the batter between two moulds or use a larger one. Steamed brown bread slices cleanly with a length of thread rather than a knife, and is customarily eaten warm with butter or alongside baked beans.
Steamed brown bread of this type is a New England staple, built from grains a colonial household was likely to have to hand — rye, cornmeal and a little wheat — sweetened with molasses from the West Indies trade and cooked by steam rather than in an oven, which suited a kitchen where the fire was always going but the brick oven was heated only on baking day. The soda-and-buttermilk leavening marks it as a nineteenth-century version: before chemical leavening was common in ordinary kitchens, such breads were raised with yeast or a barm, or not raised much at all. The recipe names Arm & Hammer soda twice, in the ingredient list and again in the method, in the manner of the small promotional cookbooks that soda and baking powder manufacturers distributed in the later nineteenth century.