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Jersey Brown Bread
One pint Indian meal, one pint Rye meal, half a cup of molasses, one tablespoonful vinegar, half teaspoonful salt, one heaping teaspoon soda, one pint and one half pint luke warm water. Steam three or four hours.
A steamed brown bread of the New England type, leavened entirely by soda reacting with molasses and vinegar. The batter is much looser than a kneaded dough, and that is correct.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal, ground from maize. A medium or fine yellow meal works; stone-ground gives a better texture than degerminated supermarket meal.
- Rye mealCoarser than modern rye flour. Dark or medium rye flour is the closest substitute; whole-grain rye meal, if you can find it, is closer still.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups, so this is 2 cups cornmeal and 2 cups rye to 3 cups of water — a batter thin enough to pour, not a dough. Do not stiffen it.
- The leaveningThere is no yeast and no baking powder. The heaping teaspoon of soda is activated by the molasses and vinegar, so mix the soda into the dry meals, add the liquids, and get it into the mold and over heat promptly.
- VesselA pudding mold, coffee can, or straight-sided metal bowl, well greased. This batch runs to about 7 cups of batter, so use a vessel of 3 quarts or more, or divide between two smaller ones, filling no more than two-thirds. Cover the top tightly with a lid or foil tied down, or condensation will waterlog the loaf.
- How to steamSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, cover, and keep the water at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it drops; running the pot dry in a three-hour steam is the usual failure.
- Time and donenessThree to four hours is not exaggerated for a mold this size. The loaf is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top is set and springy; the crumb stays dark and moist.
- FinishingThe original calls only for steaming. If you want to dry the surface, uncover and give it 10-15 minutes in a 350F oven before unmolding. Steamed brown bread slices best warm with a serrated knife or a length of thread.
- YieldOne loaf, roughly 10-12 slices. Good with butter or alongside baked beans, and it reheats well by re-steaming.
Steamed brown bread belongs to the long era before reliable home ovens, when a kettle on the stove was more dependable than a firebox, and it survived as a habit long after ovens improved. The combination of cornmeal and rye is the older New England "rye and Indian" — wheat flour was the expensive grain, and the two cheaper meals together made a dense, sweet, keeping loaf. Molasses supplied both the sweetening and the acid that set off the soda, with a spoonful of vinegar as insurance, a trick common in recipes from the decades after saleratus and soda became household staples. The "Jersey" in the title may be no more than the sort of regional label such collections attach freely; what it refers to is not documented here.