Home › Village Receipts › Steamed Brown Bread
Steamed Brown Bread
Two cups of graham flour, one cup of white flour, one cup of corn meal, one cup of molasses, one cup of milk, two eggs, small piece of butter, one teaspoon of soda, two teaspoons of cream of Steam three hours. tartar.
— Mrs. Wheeler Howard
— Miss Matilda Jackson
A standard New England-style steamed brown bread, set down in the compressed shorthand village committees used when everyone already knew the method. The typesetting has scrambled one line: it should read "two teaspoons of cream of tartar. Steam three hours."
- The garbled line"two teaspoons of cream of Steam three hours. tartar" is a printing error. Read it as two teaspoons cream of tartar, then steam three hours.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled from the entire kernel, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; ordinary whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer crumb.
- Corn mealUse plain yellow or white cornmeal, not a self-rising mix and not degerminated fine meal if you can avoid it. Medium grind gives the characteristic slight grit.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda plus two teaspoons cream of tartar is the standard homemade baking-powder proportion, still common in household receipts even after commercial powders were available. The molasses is mildly acidic and adds to the reaction with the soda; the dark colour of the loaf comes from the molasses itself.
- Batter consistencyFour cups of dry ingredients against two cups of liquid plus two eggs makes a very stiff batter. It should be thick enough to mound on a spoon but still drop from it; add milk a few tablespoons at a time if it is closer to dough than batter.
- The mouldFill greased moulds — coffee tins, a pudding basin, or two 1-lb cans — no more than two-thirds full and cover tightly with greased foil or a cloth tied down. The bread needs room to climb, and steam must not condense into the top.
- Steaming setupStand the moulds on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up their sides, lid on, water at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it falls; running dry is the one thing that ruins the loaf.
- Three hours is rightUnlike many old timings, this one holds. Steamed breads need the long, moist, sub-boiling heat to gelatinise the cornmeal and set the coarse flour. A skewer should come out clean; turn the loaves out and dry them in a 350F oven for ten minutes if the crust is tacky.
- YieldEnough for two to three 1-lb moulds. Serve warm with butter, or with baked beans in the traditional pairing.
Steamed brown bread belongs to the New England Saturday-night table, where it shared the day with a pot of baked beans and needed no oven of its own — the steaming kettle sat on the stovetop while the beans took the heat. The three-grain formula of rye, corn and wheat is the older pattern; this version swaps rye for graham flour, the coarse whole-wheat meal promoted by the temperance reformer Sylvester Graham in the 1830s and long afterwards a health-conscious staple in household cookery. Molasses does double duty as sweetener and as a mild acid alongside the cream of tartar, and its cheapness in the Northeast owed much to the West Indies trade. The double attribution — Mrs. Wheeler Howard and Miss Matilda Jackson — is a familiar feature of church and village fundraising cookbooks, though why both names stand here cannot be established from the page.