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Raisin Bread
1½ pints (3 cups) yellow 1 teaspoonful baking soda corn meal 1 gill (1/2 cup) hot water 3/4 pint (1½ cups) Graham 1 teaspoonful salt flour 3/4 pint (1½ cups) Sultana 3/4 pint (1½ cups) white raisins flour Sour milk 1/2 pint (I cup) molasses Put the corn meal into a basin, add the flours, raisins, salt, the soda mixed with the molasses and water; make into a soft batter with the sour milk.
Fill a buttered casserole half full with the mixture, cover, and steam for three hours.
This is Boston-style steamed brown bread, set out in the two-column ingredient style of its day, which the scanner has interleaved into nonsense. Read it as: 3 cups yellow corn meal, 1 1/2 cups Graham flour, 1 1/2 cups white flour, 1 1/2 cups sultana raisins, 1 cup molasses, 1 teaspoon baking soda dissolved in 1/2 cup hot water, 1 teaspoon salt, and sour milk to bring it to a soft batter.
- Fill the pot only half fullThis is the hinge. A soda-and-molasses batter climbs hard in the first hour of steaming, and a pot filled higher will push its lid off and take on water. Half full, buttered, lid on and weighted or tied down.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the recipe itself glosses. The half-pint and three-quarter-pint measures are likewise given in cups alongside, so no conversion work is needed.
- "Casserole" hereThe word appears to mean a lidded earthenware or metal pot, not a shallow baking dish. Any deep, straight-sided vessel with a tight cover works, as does a pudding basin or a coffee tin; choose one large enough that this quantity of batter fills it only half full.
- Sour milkPeriod sour milk was raw milk clabbered at room temperature, and it carried the acid that reacts with the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the direct modern stand-in. Expect to need roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups to reach a batter that drops thickly from the spoon.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ left in. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is close enough; the texture will be very slightly finer.
- SultanasGolden seedless raisins. They need no plumping here, as three hours in steam will do it.
- How to steamStand the covered pot on a rack in a larger pot, add boiling water to come halfway up its sides, and keep it at a bare simmer. Check the water level hourly and top up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- Three hours is rightUnlike many old timings, this one holds. Steamed breads cook by slow moist heat and need the full time to set the coarse meal; a skewer should come out clean and the loaf should pull slightly from the sides.
- Yield and servingA generous quantity: one very large loaf, or two smaller ones if divided between vessels. Turn it out while hot, let it stand a few minutes to firm, and cut with a string or a serrated knife rather than pressing down with a blade. Traditionally eaten warm with butter, or the next day toasted.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England tradition older than the reliable kitchen range: a batter of corn meal with rye or wheat, sweetened with molasses and raised with soda against soured milk, cooked for hours in a covered pot over water rather than in an oven. The method suited households where oven heat was expensive or unpredictable, and it produced a dense, moist, dark loaf that kept well. Corn meal and molasses were both cheap staples of the northeastern trade, and Graham flour reflects the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for coarse unbolted wheat associated with Sylvester Graham's dietary reform movement. The raisins are the small luxury that lifts this from a plain daily bread to something served with tea. A bread that requires no oven at all sits naturally in a book of covered-pot cookery.