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Brown Bread
One cup Indian meal, two cups graham or rye flour, one teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of soda; mix thoroughly. To one cup of molasses, add one pint of hot water or milk, pour into middle of the meal and stir until a smooth batter. Put in a buttered boiler, cover tightly, set in a covered kettle of boiling water (fireless cooker is better) for three hours, then bake in moderate oven one half hour.
— Mrs. Lewis P. Clarke
A steamed molasses brown bread of the New England type, finished in the oven to dry the crust. Nothing here is difficult, but the vessel and the water bath need thinking about.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal — yellow or white, medium grind. The name distinguished native maize meal from wheat flour and survived in New England cookbooks well into the twentieth century.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, unsifted, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; rye, as the recipe allows, gives the darker, denser loaf.
- Soda, not powderThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the molasses. Use unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which is more bitter and will overwhelm a loaf this small.
- MeasuresOne pint of hot liquid is two cups, so the batter is quite loose — pourable, not spoonable. That is correct for steaming; a stiff batter will not set evenly.
- The "buttered boiler"Any tight-lidded metal container that fits inside a larger pot: a pudding mould, a 1-quart coffee tin, or two clean 15-oz cans covered with foil and string. Grease it well and fill only two-thirds, as the loaf rises considerably.
- SteamingThe water in the outer kettle should come halfway up the mould and be kept at a steady simmer for the full three hours. Top it up with boiling water as it drops; letting it boil dry will scorch the loaf.
- Moderate oven350F for the final half hour, uncovered, to firm the crust and drive off surface moisture. Turn the loaf out of the mould first if it will release cleanly.
- Fireless cookerAn insulated box that held heated stones or discs and cooked by retained heat. A slow cooker on high with an inch or two of water in the bottom does the same job for the steaming stage.
- YieldOne large loaf. Best eaten warm the day it is made, with butter; it slices more neatly the next day.
Steamed brown bread belongs to the New England tradition of cooking without a reliable oven: the mixture goes into a covered tin set in boiling water, which cannot exceed 212F and so cannot burn, an advantage in a kitchen where the stove was also heating the house and doing the wash. The combination of cornmeal, rye or graham flour and molasses is the same one behind older "rye and Injun" loaves, born of a period when wheat was the expensive grain and maize the cheap one; molasses, arriving from the West Indies trade, was the standard sweetener of the northeastern kitchen long after refined sugar was available. The passing mention of a fireless cooker dates this contribution fairly closely — those insulated boxes were widely promoted in the 1900s and 1910s as fuel-saving devices, and a community cookbook like this one is exactly where you find a village cook noting that the new gadget does the job better.