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Boston Brown Bread
One cup of Indian meal, two cups rye flour, half a cup molasses, two cups sweet milk, three teaspoonfuls baking powder, a little salt. Two cups of sour milk and two teaspoons of soda can be used in preference to sweet milk and baking powder. Steam three hours and bake half an hour.
A plain two-grain version of the New England steamed loaf — no wheat flour, no raisins. The method matters more than the list: this is a batter, not a dough, and it cooks by steam before it ever sees the oven.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal, yellow or white, medium grind. Nineteenth-century Indian meal was stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket cornmeal; a stone-ground meal gives the closer texture the recipe assumes.
- Sweet milk and sour milkSweet milk is ordinary fresh whole milk. Sour milk was clabbered raw milk; buttermilk is the honest modern stand-in. Two teaspoons of soda is generous against the old rule of a teaspoon to the pint of sour milk, though the molasses is acid too and absorbs some of it; an excess leaves a soapy edge.
- The molassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the rye. Half a cup is on the restrained side for brown bread; the loaf will be mildly sweet rather than treacly.
- The vesselA pudding mold, a straight-sided pottery bowl, or well-washed coffee tins all work, but the batter runs to five cups or more, so allow around two quarts of capacity or divide it between two containers. Grease thoroughly, fill no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with greased foil or a cloth tied down — the batter climbs as it steams.
- How to steamStand the mold on a rack in a deep pot, pour boiling water halfway up its side, cover, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; three hours is a long time for a pot to run dry.
- The bakeThe half-hour finish is to dry the crust, not to cook the loaf. The recipe names no temperature; a moderate oven, in the region of 350F, uncovered, straight from the steamer. A skewer should come out clean before it goes in.
- Yield and servingYield depends on the mold used. Cut it warm with a length of thread or dental floss drawn through rather than a knife, which drags the crumb. It is a breakfast bread here, but it goes traditionally with baked beans.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England household economy in which rye and corn were the reliable local grains and wheat flour was the imported luxury — the mix was long known as "rye and Injun." Steaming rather than baking suited a kitchen with a pot always on the fire and an oven fired only occasionally, and it produces a moist, dense, dark loaf that keeps for days. The Boston association is usually traced to the bread's standing partnership with Saturday-night baked beans, both of them dishes that could be left to cook slowly. What suggests this particular version is late nineteenth century is the leavening: the writer offers commercial baking powder first and the older soda-and-sour-milk method as the alternative.