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Eastern Brown Bread
One pint each of rye or Graham and Indian meal, one cup moiasses, three-fourths cup sour milk, one and one-half tea-spoons soda, one and one-half pints cold water. Put on stove over cold water (all brown breads are better when put on to steam over cold water, which is afterwards brought to the boiling point and kept constantly boiling until bread is done); steam four hours, and brown over in the oven.
A steamed brown bread of the New England type, unsweetened except by molasses and leavened only by soda meeting the acid in sour milk and molasses. The batter is deliberately slack — nearer a thick pancake batter than a dough — and it firms up entirely through the long steam.
- UnitsA pint here is two cups by volume, not a weight. So: 2 cups rye or Graham flour, 2 cups cornmeal, 3 cups cold water, plus the cup of molasses and 3/4 cup sour milk.
- Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal, in this period stone-ground and fairly coarse. Medium-grind yellow cornmeal is the closest match; fine degerminated meal gives a smoother, less interesting crumb.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour, ground with the bran and germ left in. Ordinary whole-wheat flour works; rye, the first option given, makes the darker and more traditional loaf.
- Sour milkSour milk in 1877 meant raw milk clabbered at room temperature. Use cultured buttermilk, which supplies the same acid to react with the soda. Pasteurised milk left out simply spoils.
- SaltThe original gives none. A teaspoon of salt in the dry ingredients is worth adding.
- VesselGrease a pudding mould or the traditional 1-lb coffee tins, and fill no more than two-thirds; the batter runs to roughly two quarts, so it needs a mould of three quarts or more, or dividing between tins. Cover tightly with a lid or with foil tied down; steam condensing into an open mould will waterlog the loaf.
- The cold-water startThis is the instruction the recipe itself stops to explain: the mould goes into cold water and the whole is brought up to the boil together. Keep the water at a steady boil and top it up with boiling water so it never drops below the halfway mark on the mould.
- Browning offFour hours of steaming leaves the surface pale and damp. Turn the loaf out and give it 10 to 15 minutes in a moderate oven, around 350F, though the original specifies no temperature, to dry the surface. A skewer should come out clean before it goes in.
- Yield and servingThe batter is heavy: reckon on something over three pounds of finished bread, more than one small tin's worth. Cut it with a taut string or a serrated knife rather than pressing down with a blade, and serve warm with butter; it was standard alongside baked beans.
Steamed brown bread belongs to the New England kitchen, where it was the standing partner to Saturday-night baked beans, and the "Eastern" in the title suggests that a Midwestern audience regarded it as a regional import worth copying. A loaf steamed for four hours over a pot could share the stove with everything else, while a wheat loaf needed a hot oven kept hot. The rye-and-cornmeal combination is older still, going back to the colonial habit of stretching scarce wheat with the two grains that grew readily in the Northeast — the same mixture behind "rye and Injun" bread. Buckeye Cookery, published in the 1870s as a church fundraiser by the women of Marysville, Ohio, credited many contributors by name and place, and its bread-making chapter is unusually explicit about method: the parenthetical lecture on starting brown breads over cold water is exactly the kind of hard-won stove knowledge the book existed to pass along.