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Boston Brown Bread (C buttermilk or sour milk C)
3 C buttermilk or sour milk 2 C Graham flour 2 C corn meal 1 C molasses Mrs. John Dollenmaier. 1 C raisins 2 t salt 2 tsoda Put salt and soda into milk, add the meal and flour, then the molasses and raisins. powder cans.
Steam from 3 to 4 hours in 1 pound baking Faye Ree.
Two contributions have been run together on the page: Mrs. Dollenmaier's complete steamed brown bread, and the opening ingredients of a second version from Faye Ree that breaks off before its method. Work from the first list, which is whole and balanced.
- The hinge is steam, not bakingBrown bread is a pudding-batter cooked in moist heat; it never browns or forms a crust. Set the filled, covered molds on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up their sides, cover the pot, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full 3 to 4 hours, topping up with boiling water as it drops.
- Baking powder cansA one-pound baking powder can held about 2 cups. Modern tin cans are lined with coatings not meant for prolonged heating, and most are ridged so the loaf will not slide out. Use straight-sided 1-pint pudding molds, heatproof glass jars, or 1-lb coffee tins with the seam checked, filled two-thirds full and covered with foil tied down or a lid left unclamped so steam can escape.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground, with the bran left in. Ordinary whole-wheat flour is the closest supermarket equivalent; a coarse grind gives the right texture.
- Corn mealUse plain yellow or white cornmeal, not a self-rising mix and not fine corn flour. A medium grind suits this batter.
- MolassesUnsulphured cooking molasses. Blackstrap is much more bitter than what this recipe expects and will dominate the loaf.
- Soda and sour milkTwo teaspoons of soda is a lot, but it is neutralizing both the buttermilk and the molasses. Stir the soda and salt into the milk first, as directed, then mix the batter quickly and get it into the molds; the leavening starts working immediately.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer pushed into the center comes out clean and the loaf pulls slightly from the mold. The batter runs to roughly nine cups, so at two-thirds full it fills six or seven 1-lb cans. Let them stand five minutes, then turn out and cool upright.
- The second list is incompleteFaye Ree's ingredients give no baking powder, soda, or molasses and no method, so quantities cannot be inferred honestly. Treat it as a fragment rather than trying to reconstruct it.
Steamed brown bread belongs to New England, where cornmeal, rye or graham flour, and molasses were the cheap staples and where the dish became inseparable from Saturday-night baked beans. Steaming rather than baking suited a household with a kettle always on the stove and no reliable oven, and the sour-milk-and-soda leavening let a cook raise a heavy grain batter without yeast or waiting. The baking powder can as a mold is a period detail worth noticing: tinned goods were reused as a matter of course, and the size was standard enough that a cook could write "1 pound baking powder cans" and expect to be understood.