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Rhode Island Brown Bread
2 cups corn meal 1½ cups rye meal 1 egg 1 cup molasses 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda ½ teaspoon salt 1 quart milk.
Mix and bake in covered dish in moderately hot oven.
A wheatless New England brown bread, closer to a thick batter than a dough. The original gives no baking time at all, which is the one thing a modern cook needs most.
- Time and temperature"Moderately hot" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 375-400F, though period equivalences varied. A quart of milk in a covered dish will not set quickly at that heat; allow something in the region of 1½ to 2 hours, and judge by a skewer to the centre coming out clean and the loaf pulling slightly from the sides.
- Rye mealNot rye flakes and not light rye bread flour. Rye meal is coarsely ground whole rye; whole-grain or pumpernickel rye flour is the closest thing on modern shelves, with medium rye the nearest common substitute.
- Corn mealUse stone-ground medium or fine yellow cornmeal, not degerminated fine grind and not polenta-coarse grits. Coarse meal will stay gritty in a batter this wet.
- The leaveningTwo teaspoons cream of tartar plus one of soda is the old way of building baking powder in the bowl, and the molasses adds further acid. Mix and get it into the oven at once; the reaction begins the moment the liquid is in.
- The covered dishThe lid is what makes this bread rather than a corn pudding: it traps steam so the meals hydrate and the crust stays soft. A lidded casserole, a Dutch oven, or a bowl tightly sealed with foil all work. Do not bake it uncovered.
- ConsistencyRoughly 3½ cups of meal to a quart of milk gives a batter you pour, not one you shape. That is correct for brown bread; resist the urge to add flour.
- MilkSweet whole milk is meant here. If you substitute buttermilk or soured milk, the cream of tartar becomes redundant and the balance changes.
- Yield and servingThe batter runs to well over two quarts, so use a covered dish of three quarts or more to leave room for rising. Traditionally cut thick and eaten warm with butter, or alongside baked beans and chowder.
Brown bread made from rye and cornmeal without any wheat is one of the oldest surviving colonial New England breads, descended from the mixture early settlers called "rye and Injun" — rye because it grew where wheat did not, Indian meal because corn was abundant. Rhode Island kept a plain version alongside its jonnycakes, and the loaf is generally traced to the household practice of steaming or slow-baking a covered batter in the residual heat of a brick oven after the week's bread came out. Molasses, cheap and dark, does the sweetening and much of the colour, as it does in the baked beans this bread is often said to accompany.