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Steamed Corn Bread
Two cups each corn meal, Graham flour and sour milk, twothirds cup molasses, one tea-spoon soda; steam two hours and a half. -Mrs. Jennie Guthrie Cherry, Newark.
A close cousin of Boston brown bread: a soda-leavened batter cooked by steam rather than in the oven. The recipe assumes you know how to rig a steamer, so that is where most of the work of translation lies.
- The hinge: a covered mold in gentle steamThis batter comes to roughly five cups, so use a greased 2-quart or larger pudding mold, coffee can or heatproof bowl, filled no more than two-thirds full, or divide it between two smaller molds. Cover it tightly with a lid or foil tied down. Set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the mold, keep the water at a bare simmer, and top it up with boiling water as it drops so the pot never runs dry.
- Graham flourNineteenth-century Graham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour milled from the entire kernel. Ordinary whole-wheat flour works; a stone-ground coarse grind is closer to the original texture.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which is not what today's refrigerated milk does when it goes off. Use buttermilk, or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup and left to stand ten minutes.
- SodaOne teaspoon of soda for two cups of sour milk is about the usual proportion for the acid present, though it is a modest amount against four cups of meal and flour; the loaf will be dense either way, which is correct for this style. Sift or whisk the soda through the dry ingredients so it does not streak.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what was sold as molasses in Ohio in the 1870s.
- No salt is listedWhether it was assumed or simply left out cannot be told from the text. A teaspoon of salt in the dry mixture makes a noticeable difference.
- ConsistencyThe batter should be thick but pourable, like a heavy muffin batter. If your cornmeal is very fine or the meal absorbs more than expected, loosen with a little more sour milk rather than adding flour.
- Doneness and finishingAfter two and a half hours a skewer should come out clean; the top will look set and slightly domed but never browned. To dry the crust, uncover and put the mold in a 350°F oven for 10 to 15 minutes before turning the loaf out.
- YieldOne loaf, about eight to ten thick slices. It slices best warm with a serrated knife or a length of thread, and it reheats well by steaming again for 20 minutes.
Steamed breads of this kind belong to the New England brown-bread tradition — cornmeal and a coarse wheat or rye meal, molasses for sweetening and colour, sour milk and soda for lift — carried west by settlers into Ohio, where Buckeye Cookery was compiled in 1877 from contributions by named housewives like Mrs. Cherry of Newark. Steaming was practical rather than quaint: it needed only a kettle over whatever fire was already burning, and it spared the cook from heating a wood range for hours in summer. The sour-milk-and-soda pairing dates from the decades before chemical baking powder was cheap and reliable, and it made use of milk that had turned in an unrefrigerated pantry. "Graham" flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the temperance and dietary reformer of the 1830s whose advocacy of whole, unsifted meal made the term a standard grocery label long after his own following faded.