Corn Bread
One pint sweet milk, one quart buttermilk or sour milk, one pint flour, one quart meal, one half cup molasses, one heaping teaspoon soda, one teaspoon salt, steam three hours.
This is a steamed corn bread in the New England brown-bread manner, not a baked pan bread, and the three hours of steam are not negotiable — the batter is thin and has no eggs or fat to set it. Read the batter as a pudding batter and everything else follows.
- Meal means cornmeal"Meal" in nineteenth-century American recipes is cornmeal, usually a medium or coarse stone grind. Fine degerminated supermarket meal works but gives a softer, less characterful loaf.
- Sweet milk and sour milkSweet milk is plain fresh whole milk. Sour milk was clabbered raw milk; cultured buttermilk is the standing substitute, though it is often less sharply acidic than the original, which matters for the soda.
- The soda is the weak pointOne heaping teaspoon of soda for a quart of buttermilk is on the low side by modern reckoning, where something nearer two teaspoons is the usual allowance for that much acid. Expect a dense, close-grained loaf; that is the traditional texture, but if you want more lift you are within reason at two teaspoons.
- VolumesA pint is 2 cups and a quart 4 cups, so this is 2 cups flour, 4 cups cornmeal, 2 cups sweet milk and 4 cups sour — on the order of two to three quarts of batter. Filled two-thirds, not one, that is four or more greased quart moulds or coffee cans.
- How to steamCover each mould tightly with greased foil or a tied cloth, stand them on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water as it falls; if the pot runs dry the bread scorches and stops cooking.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity and will fight the corn. The half cup is for colour and a faint sweetness, not to make a sweet bread.
- DonenessAfter three hours a skewer to the centre should come out clean and the loaf should pull slightly from the mould. Steamed breads look wet on the surface even when done; let them stand ten minutes, then turn out and dry the crust briefly in a 350F oven if you like.
- ServingTwelve to sixteen breakfast servings. It is best hot with butter, and the leftovers are better sliced thick and fried in butter the next morning than eaten cold.
Steamed corn bread belongs to the same New England household tradition as Boston brown bread, where a batter of cornmeal, wheat or rye, sour milk and molasses was cooked for hours in a covered mould set in a kettle of simmering water. The method predates reliable ovens and outlived them: a kettle on the range needed no watching beyond a top-up of boiling water, and it could be set going before breakfast or left through the afternoon while the cook did other work. Molasses did the sweetening because it was cheap and shipped in barrels long before granulated sugar was an everyday grocery, and the pairing of molasses with sour milk and soda is a signature of nineteenth-century American baking, as saleratus and then baking soda came to supplement yeast and long sponges. It is a large, filling, eggless loaf made from the cheapest grain in the house.