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Steamed Brown Bread
3 cups sour milk 1 cup molasses 1 egg ½ cup raisins 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon (heaping) soda 1 cup Graham flour 1 cup Indian meal 1¾ cups Five Roses flour Steam 4 hours.
A Boston-style brown bread from a Canadian milling company's book, given in the telegraphic style of the period: ingredients, then three words of method. Everything that matters is in what it does not say.
- The hinge: it steams in a sealed moldThe batter must go into greased, covered molds set on a rack in a covered pot, with boiling water reaching halfway up their sides. Uncovered, the top wets and slumps; unsealed molds also let condensation in. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates over the four hours.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which modern pasteurized milk will not reliably do. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup; its acidity is what activates the soda.
- Indian mealCornmeal; in this period often a fairly fine yellow or white meal rather than a modern coarse polenta grind, though grinds varied. Graham flour is whole wheat; Five Roses was the company's general household flour, milled from hard wheat and used here as an all-purpose flour would be.
- A heaping teaspoon of sodaRead that as about 1½ teaspoons. With 3 cups of buttermilk and a cup of molasses there is plenty of acid to take it up; level it off if your molasses is blackstrap, which is more bitter and less acidic than lighter grades.
- Molasses, not blackstrapCooking molasses of this period was probably closer to today's mild or "fancy" molasses. Blackstrap gives a harsh, almost metallic loaf here.
- Vessels and fill levelThe batter comes to something over six cups, so allow about three 1-lb coffee tins, or a pudding mould of three quarts. Fill no more than two-thirds; this is a wet batter that rises considerably and then sets.
- Four hours is not an exaggerationSteamed breads cook slowly and gelatinize the cornmeal, which is the point of the texture. Test at 3½ hours: a skewer should come out clean and the center should read about 200F. Ten minutes in a 350F oven with the mold uncovered dries the crust if you want it firmer.
- Yield and servingTwo or three small loaves, depending on the moulds used. Turn out while hot, cool briefly, and slice with a thread or a serrated knife -- the crumb is moist enough to smear under pressure. Traditionally eaten warm with butter, or with baked beans.
Steamed brown bread is often said to be the New England answer to a kitchen without a dependable oven: a pot of water on the stove will hold a steady temperature all afternoon, which cornmeal and rye or graham flour need in order to soften. The combination of cornmeal with wheat and molasses is generally traced to colonial households where wheat was scarce and imported molasses from the West Indies was the cheapest sweetener available; "Indian meal" is the older name for maize meal, distinguishing it from English grain. That this version appears in the Five Roses Cook Book — a promotional collection issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and assembled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — shows how far the dish had traveled north by the early twentieth century, and how a flour company was content to print a recipe in which its own product is only one of three flours.