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Light Brown Bread
Formula Prepared brown bread meal, 6 lbs.
Molasses, 1 pt.
Water, 32 to 4 qts.
Method Put the water and molasses in a bowl and mix to incorporate the molasses with the water. Now add the prepared meal and mix until smooth.
Put the mixture in brown bread tins which have previously been greased and dusted. Grease and dust the caps and put them on the pans. Put the pans into a water bath and boil until the bread is thoroughly cooked. Where large quantities of brown bread are made, a steamer is used for cooking the bread. The small baker generally puts the brown bread in a container having water, which is then covered and placed in the oven.
In Boston where the bakers make large quantities of brown bread, the brown bread is placed into containers having water and then put into a cool oven generally after the day's baking is done.
A bakery formula rather than a home recipe: it assumes a commercial premix, tinned molds with clamp-on lids, and a steam cabinet. All of it scales down, but a few things need translating first.
- Prepared brown bread mealA commercial blend sold to bakers; such "prepared" meals generally combined the grains with leavening and salt already mixed in, though this formula does not say so. Nothing equivalent sits on a supermarket shelf. The usual substitute is equal parts rye flour, cornmeal and whole wheat flour, with roughly 3/4 to 1 teaspoon baking soda and 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon salt per cup of total meal.
- The water quantity is garbled"32 to 4 qts" is almost certainly a typesetting error for 3 1/2 to 4 quarts. Against 6 lbs of meal and a pint of molasses that gives a slack, pourable batter closer to thick pancake batter than dough — mix to that consistency rather than to a fixed number.
- Scale it downSix pounds of meal with the molasses and water makes something like fifteen pounds of batter. For a single 1-lb loaf, work at about one-tenth: 10 oz meal, 3 tablespoons molasses, 1 1/2 to 1 2/3 cups water.
- Tins and capsBrown bread tins are straight-sided cylinders with a friction lid, which is why the recipe says to grease and dust the caps too. A 1-lb coffee tin, a pudding basin, or a wide-mouth canning jar covered with greased foil and tied down all work. Fill no more than two-thirds — the batter rises hard against the lid.
- Water bath depthThe water should come halfway up the molds, not over them, and should be at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; a mold that runs dry will scorch on the bottom.
- Time and donenessThe formula gives no time because a steam cabinet varies. Reckon on 2 1/2 to 3 hours for a 1-lb mold. The loaf is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top is set and dry; underdone brown bread is gummy at the center and will not improve on standing.
- The "cool oven"The Boston practice described here is using the falling heat of a bread oven after the day's bake. The book gives no temperature; a slow oven of roughly 250-300F is the usual modern reading, with the covered water container doing the actual cooking. A covered roasting pan of hot water at that heat reproduces it closely.
- ServingLet the loaves stand five minutes, then run a knife around and slide them out while still warm. Traditionally cut with a length of thread rather than a knife, which drags in the moist crumb, and eaten with baked beans or with butter and cream cheese.
Steamed brown bread belongs to New England, and the book's aside about Boston bakers is the giveaway: it was a commercial staple there, and elsewhere in the region a Saturday-night home ritual, eaten alongside baked beans. The dish is often said to descend from colonial households that had rye and corn in quantity but little wheat, though the steamed version as described here depends on chemical leavening — saleratus or soda — and so belongs to the nineteenth century, whereas the earlier rye-and-Indian bread was generally oven-baked. A batter of rye and Indian meal has too little gluten to make a proper raised loaf, so it was cooked in a covered pot in steam instead, which produces a dense, dark, faintly sweet crumb rather than a crust. Molasses did the sweetening because it was cheap and abundant through the West Indies trade, and it also feeds the alkaline leavening. By the date of this formula the labor had shifted to the bakery, where a premixed meal and a steam cabinet turned an all-afternoon domestic job into something a shop could run off the residual heat of the ovens after the day's real baking was finished.