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Ella's Brown Bread
1 C flour 1 C corn meal 1 C Graham flour 1/2 C sugar Pinch salt 1 C sour milk. 2 t soda 1/2 C molasses 1/2 C boiling water 1/2 C seeded raisins 14 C currants Mix well the flour, corn meal and Graham flour. Add sugar, salt and sour milk in which one teaspoon soda has been dissolved. To the one-half cup of molasses add the other teaspoon of soda and the boiling water. Add raisins and currants well floured. Put in baking powder cans, set in kettle of boiling water and steam 2 hours. Mrs. Chas. Greenwood.
A community-cookbook steamed brown bread, printed with its ingredient list badly mangled — the method paragraph names several things the quantities never made it onto the page for. Read the notes before shopping.
- Missing quantitiesAs printed, only the soda, molasses, boiling water, raisins and currants have amounts. The flour, corn meal, Graham flour, sugar, salt and sour milk are called for in the method but their measures were dropped in typesetting. Any figure given for them would be invention; use a comparable steamed brown bread recipe for proportions, or the traditional one cup each of corn meal, rye or Graham, and white flour.
- "14 C currants"Almost certainly a broken fraction for 1/4 cup, matching the 1/2 cup of raisins. Fourteen cups is not a plausible reading.
- Abbreviations"t" is teaspoon and "C" is cup in this book. Two teaspoons of soda total, split — one dissolved in the sour milk, one stirred into the molasses.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Substitute buttermilk cup for cup, or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup and left ten minutes.
- The molasses and soda stepSoda stirred into molasses with boiling water foams up hard and fast. Mix it in a vessel with room to climb and fold it into the batter at once — the lift is chemical and will not wait.
- Flouring the fruitTossing raisins and currants in a little of the measured flour keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom of the cans during a two-hour steam.
- Baking powder cansPeriod cans were plain tinplate. Modern food cans carry a polymer lining not meant for repeated heating, and cans with any coating or printing on the interior should be avoided. One-pound coffee tins, straight-sided pudding molds or wide-mouth jars work; fill two-thirds and cover with foil or a tied cloth so condensation does not fall in.
- SteamingSet the filled cans on a rack in a deep pot, water reaching halfway up their sides, lid on, water at a bare simmer for the full two hours. Top up with boiling water as it drops. The bread is done when a skewer comes out clean; slide the loaves out hot and let them dry a few minutes before slicing.
- YieldNot determinable as printed, since the bulk ingredients have no measures; fill whatever cans you use two-thirds full and judge from that. Traditionally eaten warm with butter, or alongside baked beans.
Steamed brown bread belongs to the New England tradition of "thirds bread" — corn meal, rye and wheat in equal parts — a formula that predates dependable home ovens and survived long after them because the steamed loaf keeps moist for days. Molasses, cheap and dark, did the sweetening and the coloring; the soda-and-sour-milk pairing is often said to have been the common leavening in kitchens where commercial baking powder was still a considered purchase. By the time this book was compiled, the dish had traveled west with New England settlers into Illinois and become ordinary Saturday-night food, the companion to a pot of baked beans.