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Boston Corn Bread
One cup sweet milk, two cups sour milk, two-thirds cup molasses, one cup flour, four cups corn meal, two tea-spoons soda; steam three hours, and brown a few minutes in the oven. -Mrs. Canby, Bellefontaine, Ohio.
— Mrs. B.'S Corn Bread
One quart sour milk, three eggs, two table-spoons lard or butter (or half and half), one table-spoon sugar, a pinch of salt, handful of wheat flour, and enough corn meal (sifted) to make a good batter; add one heaping tea-spoon soda, stir thoroughly, and bake in long dripping pan.
Two versions from the same page: a steamed loaf in the Boston brown bread manner, and a quick skillet-style cornbread baked in a dripping pan. Neither gives a pan size or a temperature, so the notes below fill in what a modern cook needs.
- Sour milk means buttermilkIn 1877 "sour milk" was raw milk left to clabber, acidic enough to react with soda. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute, measure for measure; whole milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup also works.
- The soda is the leavening, and it needs the acidThere is no baking powder in either recipe. The two teaspoons of soda in the first loaf are neutralized by the two cups of sour milk and the molasses; the cup of sweet milk adds liquid without adding acid. Do not substitute all sweet milk, or the bread will taste soapy and stay flat.
- Corn mealNineteenth-century "corn meal" was stone-ground and coarser than modern degerminated meal. Either works, but stone-ground gives the grittier texture the recipes assume. Yellow or white is a regional preference, not a functional one.
- Steaming the first loafThis makes roughly two quarts of batter, so use a greased 3-quart pudding mold or bowl (or divide it between two smaller tins), filled no more than two-thirds full. Cover tightly with a lid or foil tied down, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water halfway up the sides. Three hours is not an exaggeration for a batter this dense; top up the water as it boils away.
- "Brown a few minutes in the oven"The original gives no heat. Uncover the steamed loaf and, in a modern oven, about 10 minutes at roughly 400F will dry the crust. This is a finishing step, not baking, so the oven need not be hot from the start.
- Salt in the first recipeNo salt is listed. Add about a teaspoon to the dry ingredients if you want it.
- Baking Mrs. B.'s versionThe original gives no temperature. A "long dripping pan" is a shallow roasting or jelly-roll pan; a well-greased 9x13 is a reasonable modern equivalent. As a modern starting point, bake at about 425F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the center is set and the edges have pulled away.
- "Enough corn meal to make a good batter"With a quart of buttermilk and three eggs, expect roughly 4 to 5 cups of meal. Aim for a batter that pours thickly and slumps rather than mounds.
- YieldThe steamed loaf is a large one, well over two pounds, and slices into a dozen or more; best eaten warm with butter. The baked version fills a 9x13 pan and serves 10 to 12.
Steamed cornmeal-and-molasses bread is a New England brown bread of the sort often traced to wheat scarcity and unreliable hearth ovens, with a kettle of boiling water always available on the fire, though the more usual form of the bread is rye-and-cornmeal; the long, moist heat softens coarse meal in a way dry baking does not. That this appears in an Ohio compilation credited to a woman in Bellefontaine may suggest how recipes traveled with settlers along the migration routes west out of New England, though the name's origin is a matter of inference rather than evidence. Buckeye Cookery was assembled in 1877 from contributions gathered by Ohio housewives, which is why the same page can carry two unrelated cornbreads, each in its contributor's own shorthand, with pan sizes and oven heats left to the reader's judgment as they would have been in a household letter.