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Steamed Brown Bread (Home-Made Boston Brown Bread)
1 large tablespoon cooking molasses 2 tablespoons brown sugar ½ teaspoon salt 2 cups Graham flour 1 cup Five Roses flour 2 cups buttermilk (or sour milk) 2 teaspoons soda (dissolved in little hot water and then added to sour milk).
Mix well and put in a well-buttered pan. Steam 2 hours. Then place in moderate oven for 15 minutes.
A straightforward steamed quick bread that needs no yeast and no kneading; the only real skill is keeping the steam going for two hours without letting the pot run dry.
- The hinge: steam, don't boil the batterThe pan must sit on a rack above simmering water in a covered pot, not in it, and the water should never come more than halfway up the mould. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pot never runs dry over the two hours.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose hard-wheat flour, sold by Lake of the Woods Milling Co., which published this book to promote it. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the direct substitute.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ returned. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; regular whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer crumb.
- SodaTwo teaspoons of baking soda for two cups of buttermilk is on the generous side and can leave a soapy note. One and a half is safer, and dissolving it in a spoonful of hot water before stirring it into the milk, as directed, prevents streaks.
- "1 large tablespoon"I.e. not a level spoonful. Read it as a rounded modern tablespoon, somewhere around 15 to 20 ml of molasses. Use unsulphured cooking molasses rather than blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity.
- The panA 1.5 to 2 quart pudding mould, coffee tin or straight-sided tin, buttered and filled no more than two-thirds. Cover the top with buttered foil or paper tied down so condensation does not drip in and waterlog the loaf.
- Moderate ovenConventionally somewhere around 350 to 375F for the final 15 minutes. This dries the outside and firms a crust on a loaf that comes out of the steamer damp and slack.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer into the centre should come out clean; if not, steam another 20 minutes. Makes one loaf, roughly 8 to 10 slices. Cool 10 minutes before unmoulding, and slice with a sawing motion or a length of thread.
Boston brown bread belongs to the New England tradition of steaming breads and puddings in a covered pot rather than baking them, a practical habit in kitchens where hearth or stove space was limited and a pot of water was already on. The classic Boston version is made with a mixture of rye meal, cornmeal and wheat, sweetened with molasses and steamed in a can, and it is inseparable from Saturday-night baked beans. This Canadian version, from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company's Five Roses Cook Book, drops the rye and corn for Graham flour and buttermilk, which makes it as much a soda bread as a brown bread. Cookbooks issued by flour millers were a common form of advertising in the early twentieth century.