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Boston Brown Bread Sandwiches
Boston brown bread makes delicious sandwiches. Butter, and cut in thin slices, and add a thin round of white bread. Or omit the white bread and fill with chopped nuts.
Barely a recipe and more a serving note, but it depends on a specific loaf and a specific way of cutting it.
- What Boston brown bread isA dense, dark, molasses-sweetened loaf of rye, cornmeal and wheat leavened with baking soda and steamed rather than baked. It is still sold canned, which is why the slices come out as neat rounds; a homemade loaf steamed in a coffee tin or pudding mould behaves the same way.
- Butter first, then sliceThe instruction reads in that order. Steamed brown bread is moist and crumbly, and buttering the cut face of the loaf before slicing it away may help support the crumb, though the recipe does not explain itself.
- Getting thin slicesChill the loaf thoroughly and use a long serrated knife with a sawing motion, no downward pressure. The recipe says only 'thin' and leaves the thickness to the cook.
- The white bread roundCut a circle of thin white bread the same diameter as the brown loaf, using a cookie cutter or a glass rim. The recipe does not say how the layers are stacked; the contrast between dark and light bread is presumably the point.
- The nut versionChopped walnuts or pecans need something to bind them; softened butter alone is thin, and cream cheese loosened with a little milk would serve, though the recipe specifies nothing beyond the nuts. Chop them fine or the sandwich will not close.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on how thin the slices are cut, which the recipe does not specify. They are tea sandwiches, not lunch; serve them the day they are cut, covered with a damp cloth if they must wait an hour.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England tradition built around what the region actually grew: rye and cornmeal rather than abundant wheat, sweetened with molasses that arrived through the same Atlantic trade that supplied Boston's rum distilleries. It is traditionally the partner to Saturday-night baked beans. The loaf's cylindrical shape follows from steaming the batter in a tall tin or mould. Its appearance under sandwiches reflects the early twentieth-century vogue for dainty tea sandwiches, where a sweet, dark, sturdy bread paired with nuts or cheese let a cook build something substantial without recourse to ham or tongue.