Dough
To the sponge add: 1 pint luke warm water 1 pint sifted rye flour 3 pints Gold Medal flour 2 teaspoons salt Mix the dough thoroughly and allow to stand 20 minutes. Mould into loaves and place in pans. Allow to rise in pans about 40 minutes or until it rises one-third its volume. Bake in medium oven. When taken from oven brush with water.
Rye n Injin. 1 cup corn meal 3 cups rye meal sifted 4 cups scalded milk 2 tablespoons molasses 1 teaspoon salt 1 yeast cake dissolved in 2 tablespoons of water Scald the corn meal with the milk, let it cook for fifteen minutes; add the molasses and salt and let it cool. When luke warm add the dissolved yeast cake and beat the batter thoroughly. Mix in the rye meal. Put into an iron or steel pan, bake in a moderate oven for two hours, cover closely if there is danger of browning.
Boston Brown Bread (Steamed) 2 cups rye meal 1 cup corn meal 1/3 cup molasses 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon soda 2 cups sour milk Mix and sift dry ingredients, add the sour milk and molasses; pour into a buttered mould and steam three hours. Brown in oven twenty minutes.
Three related rye breads, printed as a block: the tail end of a sponge-method rye loaf, then the baked rye-and-cornmeal loaf called Rye 'n Injin, then steamed Boston brown bread. The first recipe is unusable on its own — it begins mid-process and depends on a sponge (yeast, liquid and part of the flour, set to ferment) started on the previous page.
- The missing sponge"To the sponge add" refers back to an overnight or several-hour sponge from the preceding recipe in the book. Without it you have no leavening in loaf one; treat that first block as a continuation rather than a standalone formula.
- Rye meal is not rye flourRye meal is coarsely ground whole rye, closer to a medium or pumpernickel grind than to the light rye flour sold in supermarkets. Substituting fine light rye gives a slacker batter and a much softer, less nutty crumb.
- Yeast cakeOne yeast cake of the period was a compressed fresh cake of roughly 0.6 oz. Substitute one packet of active dry yeast, about 2¼ teaspoons, and let it dissolve fully before beating it in.
- Oven temperatures"Medium" and "moderate" are both best read as somewhere around 350-375F. Rye 'n Injin wants the full two hours at that heat because it is a wet batter bread in a deep pan; cover with foil once the top has set, as the recipe itself suggests ("cover closely if there is danger of browning"), and pull it at an internal temperature of 200-210F.
- Scalding the mealCooking the cornmeal in scalded milk for fifteen minutes is the hinge of Rye 'n Injin. It gelatinises the starch so the loaf holds moisture instead of turning gritty. Cool the mush to lukewarm before the yeast goes in or the yeast dies.
- Sour milk and sodaIn the brown bread, sour milk means naturally soured raw milk; cultured buttermilk is the correct modern stand-in and supplies the acid the teaspoon of soda needs. Pasteurised milk soured with vinegar works but yields a thinner batter.
- The steaming mouldA one-pound coffee tin, a pudding basin, or two 15-oz cans, buttered and filled two-thirds full, then covered tightly with foil. Stand on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water halfway up the mould, topping up as needed for the three hours.
- Brushing with waterThe water wash on the rye loaf straight from the oven softens and glosses the crust, standard practice for rye. Do it while the loaf is still hot enough to flash the moisture off.
- YieldNot stated in the book. The first dough (four pints of flour and meal plus whatever the sponge contributes) should give two or three average loaves; Rye 'n Injin fills one deep pan; the brown bread fills roughly a quart mould or two cans, serving six to eight. Brown bread slices are traditionally cut with a thread rather than a knife.
"Rye 'n Injin" is New England shorthand for rye and Indian — Indian meal being the colonial name for maize meal, distinguished from the English wheat and rye the settlers knew. Wheat grew poorly in the northern colonies while rye and corn thrived, so the two were combined for daily bread, and the pairing long outlived the necessity that produced it. Boston brown bread is the steamed version of the same idea: the household brick oven was fired for the weekly baking, and a pudding mould set over water on the stove let a family make bread on any other day. That both recipes survive into a milling company's flour promotional of the early twentieth century, alongside white-flour loaves, says something about how tenaciously regional bread habits held on once the flour barrel no longer dictated them.