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Brown Bread
Two and one-half cups sour milk, and one-half cup molasses; into these put one heaping tea-spoon soda, two cups corn meal, one cup Graham flour and one tea-spoon salt. Use coffee cups. Steam three hours, and afterwards brown in oven. -Mrs. D. Bassett, Minneapolis, Minn. BROWN BREAD WITH HORSFORD'S BREAD PREPARATION.
One and a fourth cups sweet milk, one cup each corn meal and Graham, one-half cup molasses, and one measure (measures are furnished with the Horsford) each of Horsford's Bread Preparation. Use coffee cups.
A steamed brown bread of the New England type, given twice: once leavened with sour milk and soda, once with a proprietary phosphate baking powder. Both are batter breads, not doughs.
- Coffee cupsThe instruction "use coffee cups" means measure everything with the same vessel, not a standardized cup. A period coffee cup runs close to 8 fl oz, so treating the measures as standard cups works; the point is consistency, since the batter depends on the ratio, not absolute volume.
- Sour milkThis is naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic, which reacts with the soda. Buttermilk is the direct substitute. Pasteurized milk left out will spoil rather than sour, so do not attempt that; if you have neither buttermilk, stir a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice into 2 1/2 cups milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, ground from the whole kernel. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; ordinary fine whole-wheat flour gives a softer, less gritty loaf.
- Horsford's Bread PreparationAn acid-phosphate leavener from the Rumford Chemical Works, sold from the 1860s onward in two parts, an acid and an alkali, with a measure furnished by the maker (hence the recipe's parenthesis). It is long gone. The second version is effectively a sweet-milk quick bread; a modern double-acting baking powder is the stand-in, though the size of the Horsford measure is not recorded and the quantity has to be judged by eye.
- The steaming vesselGrease a lidded pudding mold, coffee can or two 1-lb cans, fill no more than two-thirds, cover tightly with a lid or foil, and set on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up over the three hours.
- Three hours is not paddingSteaming sets the cornmeal slowly and keeps the crumb moist; cutting the time short leaves a wet, gummy center. A skewer should come out clean before the loaf goes to the oven.
- Browning in the ovenAfter steaming, uncover and give it 10 to 15 minutes at 400F to dry and color the surface. The bread is already cooked at this stage, so this is finish, not baking.
- Yield and servingThe batter comes to something over two pounds, enough for one large mold or two 1-lb cans. Cut warm with a length of thread rather than a knife, which drags the crumb, and serve with butter or alongside baked beans.
Steamed brown bread of cornmeal, coarse wheat and molasses is the standing companion to New England baked beans, steamed on the stovetop rather than baked. Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) collected contributions from housewives across the Midwest, and the two versions here -- the first credited to Mrs. D. Bassett of Minneapolis, the second unattributed -- show a technology in transit: one loaf leavened the old way with sour milk and soda, the other with Horsford's Bread Preparation, a two-part acid-phosphate powder marketed by the Rumford Chemical Works and named for the Harvard chemist Eben Horsford. The frank brand endorsement, complete with a note that the manufacturer supplies the measuring scoop, was common in community cookbooks of the period, when packaged chemical leaveners were new enough to need explaining.