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Boston Brown Bread, No 1
1 cup corn meal 1 cup rye meal 1 cup graham flour 2 cups sour milk 2 1/2 teaspoons soda 3/4 cup molasses 1 teaspoon salt Mix and sift the dry ingredients, excepting the soda, together; dissolve the soda in the sour milk, and add the molasses. Beat thoroughly, turn into buttered tins, and steam 3 1/2 hours.
A steamed bread rather than a baked one, and the steaming is the whole point: it sets the crumb moist and dense and gives the dark, faintly sticky crust that oven heat cannot produce. Everything else is straightforward once the vessels and the sour milk are sorted out.
- The steaming setupFill buttered molds no more than two-thirds full and cover them tightly with buttered foil or a lid, tied down, or the condensate will waterlog the top. Stand them on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water halfway up their sides, keep the water at a bare simmer, and top it up with more boiling water as it drops.
- "Buttered tins"This meant cylindrical pudding molds or any straight-sided tin with a lid. One-pound coffee tins are the usual stand-in; two 1-quart pudding basins or a set of 1-lb food tins will do. The batter comes to roughly 1 1/2 quarts, so allow about 2 quarts of mold space if filling two-thirds full.
- Sour milkNot spoiled fresh milk. It meant naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or clabbered milk; sweet milk with a tablespoon of vinegar stirred in is the usual improvised substitute.
- SodaTwo and a half teaspoons is at the upper end of the usual ratio for two cups of sour milk plus molasses. If your buttermilk is mild you may notice a soda note in the finished loaf.
- Rye meal and graham flourRye meal is coarsely ground whole rye, closer to a medium rye flour than to the light rye sold for sandwich loaves. Graham flour is coarse whole wheat, and ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is a fair substitute.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral than what a kitchen of this period meant by molasses, and it will dominate the loaf.
- Timing and donenessThree and a half hours is right for full-size molds; smaller tins may be done in about two. The bread is cooked when a skewer comes out clean and the loaf has pulled slightly from the sides.
- Yield and servingEnough for two medium molds. Unmold hot, cool slightly, and cut with a taut string or a serrated knife rather than pressing down with a blade. Traditionally eaten warm with butter, or with baked beans.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England habit of making bread from what the region actually grew: rye and Indian corn rather than the wheat that grew poorly in colonial Massachusetts. The pairing of rye and cornmeal is old enough to have its own name, "rye and injun," and the steamed version persisted into the twentieth century as the standard companion to Saturday-night baked beans, both dishes traditionally associated with cooking that could be left unattended through the Sabbath. The molasses is a survival of the New England trade in West Indian sugar, which is why it turns up in so much of the region's baking where other places would use sugar or honey.