Home › Bread, Etc. › Indian Meal Bread
Indian Meal Bread
1 1/2 cups graham flour 1 cup corn meal 1/2 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup molasses 1 2/3 cups milk Mix and steam as Boston brown bread.
A steamed brown bread in the New England manner, made without the rye that usually joins the cornmeal and wheat. The recipe assumes you already know how a Boston brown bread is handled, so the essential technique is left unwritten.
- The hinge: it is steamed, not bakedFill a greased mould — a 1-lb coffee tin, pudding basin or 6-cup cylindrical mould — about two-thirds full and cover it tightly with greased foil or a lid, so no condensation drips in. Stand it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the mould, cover, and keep at a bare simmer for 2 1/2 to 3 hours, topping up with boiling water as needed.
- Indian mealCornmeal. A fine to medium yellow or white meal suits this batter better than a coarse polenta grind. Degerminated supermarket cornmeal works but gives a drier crumb.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, unsifted, named for Sylvester Graham. Ordinary whole-wheat flour is the nearest thing on a modern shelf.
- Soda and molassesThe soda has no baking powder behind it; its only acid partner is the molasses, so use an unsulphured dark molasses rather than a light table syrup. Blackstrap will read bitter in this quantity.
- MixingCombine the dry ingredients first, then stir in the molasses and milk only until no dry flour remains. The batter should be pourable, close to a thick pancake batter; overworking toughens it.
- Doneness and finishingA skewer into the centre should come out clean. Uncover, let the loaf sit five minutes, then turn it out; a short spell in a 350F oven dries the crust if the surface feels tacky.
- Yield and servingOne loaf, about eight to ten slices. Cut warm with a length of thread rather than a knife, which drags. It is eaten with butter, alongside baked beans, or spread with cream cheese.
- KeepingThe loaf stales quickly but re-steams well; wrapped and refrigerated it slices better on the second day.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England tradition, and it is often explained by the fact that a covered pot over the fire or in a wash boiler gave steadier heat than a brick oven fired once a week. The classic version balances three meals — rye, corn and wheat — and the corn is called "Indian meal" because English colonists distinguished maize from the "corn" they had known at home, meaning grain in general; the phrase survived in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century. This variant drops the rye and leans on graham flour, a wholemeal named for Sylvester Graham that was in wide use in American baking by this period.