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Boston Brown Bread, No. 2
1 cup white flour 1 cup corn meal 1 cup graham flour 1 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup molasses 1 3/4 cups sweet milk 3/4 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon baking powder Mix dry ingredients. To half of dry ingredients add soda, and to the other half, add molasses and milk, then the baking powder. Mix thoroughly. Add remaining dry ingredients, and steam in cans for three and one-half hours. Dry in the oven for a few minutes before serving. This makes excellent toast.
A steamed quick bread, leavened twice over — soda reacting with the acid in the molasses, plus baking powder for insurance. The method matters more than the measuring: this is a batter cooked by moist heat, not a baked loaf.
- The hinge: steam, don't bakeThe long, gentle moist heat is what gives brown bread its dense, damp crumb. Set the filled molds on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up their sides, cover the pot, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full three and a half hours, topping up with boiling water as it drops.
- Graham flourWhole wheat flour, stone-ground and fairly coarse. Modern whole wheat works; if you can find coarse or graham-labeled flour it will be closer to the original texture.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- "Steam in cans"Brown bread was commonly steamed in emptied food tins. Use a pudding mold, or several greased cans large enough between them to hold the batter no more than two-thirds full -- modern can linings are not meant for repeated heating. Grease well and cover tightly with foil so condensation cannot drip in.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses. Blackstrap is markedly more bitter, and three-quarters of a cup of it will dominate the loaf.
- The odd mixing orderThe recipe gives no reason for dividing the dry ingredients and putting the soda in one half; delaying the leavening reaction is one possible explanation, but it is a guess. In practice, whisk everything dry together, stir in molasses and milk, and get the batter into the greased cans promptly.
- Drying in the ovenThe recipe asks only for a few minutes in the oven after steaming: uncover the loaves and set them in a moderate oven briefly, so the surfaces firm and the loaves slip out cleanly.
- YieldTwo or three small cylindrical loaves, depending on the size of the tins, and roughly 12 to 16 slices in all. It slices best cold, the next day; the recipe's own closing line recommends it as toast.
Boston brown bread belongs to the New England tradition of cooking with what the region had: cornmeal, coarse wheat, rye, and molasses off the West Indies trade, sweetened by trade rather than by sugar refining at home. Steaming rather than baking is generally traced to the era before reliable home ovens, when a covered pot over the fire or on the back of the stove was the dependable way to cook a bread all day, and it survived because the resulting loaf keeps well and pairs with baked beans and Saturday supper.