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Steamed Brown Bread
1/2 C sugar. 1/2 C molasses. 1 C sweet milk 2 C white flour 2 t soda dissolved in 2 C sour milk 3 C corn meal Steam three hours. This will make 5 baking powder cans of bread when steamed.
A church-supper brown bread written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew how it went: no salt, no sweetening, no pan-prep, no water level. Here is what the page assumes.
- The abbreviationsC is cup, t is teaspoon. The full list is 1 cup sweet (fresh) milk, 2 cups sour milk, 2 teaspoons baking soda, 2 cups white flour, 3 cups cornmeal — about 3 cups liquid to 5 cups dry, which gives a thick batter rather than a dough.
- Sour milkNot spoiled fresh milk, which is a different organism now that milk is pasteurized. Use buttermilk, or 2 cups milk with 2 tablespoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left 10 minutes. Dissolve the soda in it just before mixing and get the batter into the molds promptly.
- What is missingMost New England brown breads of this era carry molasses and salt. This one lists neither. If you want the familiar dark, faintly sweet loaf, molasses (around 3/4 cup) and a teaspoon of salt would take it there; as written it bakes up pale, plain and corn-forward, which may be what the contributor intended for eating with baked beans.
- Corn mealPeriod recipes mean plain yellow or white cornmeal, medium grind, not degerminated fine meal and not a self-rising mix. A stone-ground meal soaks up more liquid and gives the coarser crumb the recipe was built around.
- The moldsBaking powder cans of the day ran to roughly a pint, though sizes varied. Modern equivalents are 15-oz cans, wide-mouth pint jars, or a 2-quart pudding mold. Grease well, fill two-thirds full to leave rising room, and cover the tops with greased foil or parchment tied on so condensation does not soak the loaf.
- Steaming setupStand the molds on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up their sides, cover, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full three hours. Check the water hourly and top up with boiling water — a pot that runs dry scorches the batter and cracks the bread.
- Three hours is not paddingSteam works at 212F, not oven heat, so a dense corn batter genuinely needs the time. A skewer should come out clean and the loaf should pull from the sides.
- Yield and servingFive pint loaves, enough for a crowd. Slice with a taut string or a serrated knife while just warm; the crumb is too tender to saw at. Traditionally eaten with butter, baked beans, or cream cheese, and it reheats well by re-steaming.
Steamed brown bread belongs to the New England tradition of cooking without an oven — batter tied into a mold and set over water on the stovetop, or earlier in the ashes and the residual heat of a brick oven — and it traveled west with New England settlers into Illinois. The mix of cornmeal with wheat flour is the older colonial economy of it: corn was cheap and local, wheat flour was the expensive lightener, and using both stretched the good stuff. Baking soda with sour milk, the leavening here, replaced the slower yeast and pearlash methods over the course of the nineteenth century — saleratus and soda were already in wide domestic use by the 1840s — and the empty baking powder can as a bread mold is a small monument to how thoroughly the commercial chemical leaveners had entered the American kitchen — the cook is using both the powder's chemistry and its packaging. The recipe's telegraphic style, with no salt, no sweetening and no water level given, is typical of fundraising cookbooks, where contributors wrote for neighbors who had watched the dish being made.