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Indian Bread
Scald one pint of Indian meal with one quart of boiling water, and add one small cup of molasses, and when cool enough not to kill the yeast, put in a little more than half a cup of good yeast. or two good fresh yeast cakes, one half a teaspoon of soda, dissolved in a little hot water, a pinch of salt. Stiffen it up like white bread with white flour, mould a little, and let it rise over night. Place it in pans, let it rise a little, but not as much as white bread.
A molasses-sweetened cornmeal loaf raised overnight. The original assumes you know how to bake bread and gives neither oven temperature nor time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal, and in a nineteenth-century kitchen it would have been stone-ground and relatively coarse. A medium-grind yellow cornmeal is the closest match; fine degerminated supermarket meal gives a softer, less interesting crumb.
- The scald is the pointOne pint of meal to one quart of boiling water looks slack, but the boiling water gelatinises the starch and softens the bran so the grains do not stay gritty in the finished loaf. Do not shortcut it with warm water, and let the mush cool to about 110F before the yeast goes in or you will kill it, exactly as the recipe warns.
- Yeast"A little more than half a cup of good yeast" points to a homemade liquid barm or brewer's yeast rather than anything sold today, which is why the recipe offers two fresh yeast cakes as the alternative. Any modern equivalence is approximate; the standard conversion reckons one compressed cake at roughly 2¼ teaspoons of active dry yeast.
- Why the sodaMolasses of the period was acidic, and the half teaspoon of soda neutralises it, lightening the crumb and deepening the colour. Modern unsulphured molasses is milder but still acidic enough that the soda earns its place.
- Flour quantity"Stiffen it up like white bread" is the only measure given. Add white flour gradually until the wet mush becomes a soft kneadable dough, and expect to need a good deal of it, since cornmeal keeps absorbing liquid as it sits.
- Do not overproofThe instruction to let the panned loaves rise less than white bread is deliberate. Cornmeal dough has little gluten structure relative to its weight and will collapse in the oven if pushed to full volume; take it to about half again its size, not double.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the recipe assumes a wood range. Bake at 375F, which is a steady moderate oven, for 45 to 60 minutes; the molasses browns the crust early, so tent with foil if it darkens before the centre reaches 200 to 205F.
- YieldThe batch is a large one; divide it between loaf pans as the dough dictates rather than assuming two will hold it. It is a moist, close-grained bread that keeps better than white bread and toasts well the next morning.
"Indian meal" was the standard American term for maize meal from the colonial period well into the twentieth century, distinguishing it from meal or flour made of wheat, and the word survives in Indian pudding. A yeast-raised loaf combining cornmeal with white flour and molasses belongs to the same family as the better-known thirded bread or "rye and Injun," which stretched scarce wheat with cheaper grains. The instruction to mix the dough at night and bake in the morning suits a kitchen where an overnight rise cost nothing but planning.