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Third Bread
2 quarts yellow corn meal 2 teaspoons salt Boiling water 1/2 cup molasses 1 quart rye flour 1 yeast cake Mix the corn meal and salt and pour over them enough boiling water to moisten the mixture but not to make a batter. When cool add the molasses and the yeast mixed with a little water. Add the rye flour to the corn meal mixture gradually, alternating it, if necessary, with lukewarm water in order to keep the dough thin enough to be stirred with a spoon. Let it rise until light, form into a loaf, and bake in a slow oven four or five hours.
A very large batch of dense, slow-baked rye-and-corn bread, closer in character to Boston brown bread than to a sandwich loaf. Two things decide whether it works: scalding the meal properly, and giving it the full low bake.
- Scald the meal, don't drown itThe boiling water gelatinizes the corn starch so the meal stops absorbing liquid later and the crumb is not gritty. Add it in stages until the meal is uniformly damp and clumping but still crumbly, never pourable. Let it cool to under 110F before the yeast goes in or you will kill it.
- Volumes, in cups2 quarts corn meal is 8 cups (roughly 2 1/2 lb); 1 quart rye flour is 4 cups. The original directs a single loaf, though this quantity is more manageable divided into two large or three medium ones. Halving the whole recipe is sensible for a modern oven and household.
- Yeast cakeYeast cakes of the period varied, but a compressed fresh cake was commonly around 0.6 oz, near enough to one packet (2 1/4 tsp) of active dry yeast. Dissolve it in a few tablespoons of lukewarm water as directed. With this much heavy meal and molasses the rise is slow; expect several hours, not one.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; a slow oven is conventionally somewhere around 275-300F. The long bake is not padding: rye and scalded corn meal set very slowly, and four to five hours at low heat is what converts the wet mass into a sliceable loaf. Cover the pans loosely with foil if the tops darken before the centers are done.
- Judge it by temperatureThe original gives no test for doneness. A deep loaf like this reads 205-210F at the center when finished; below that the middle stays pasty.
- Corn meal typeUse a coarse or medium stone-ground yellow meal rather than fine degerminated supermarket meal, which gives a chalkier crumb. Rye flour here means medium or dark rye; light rye will lift more but taste flat.
- Dough consistencyThis is a batter-stiff dough stirred with a spoon, not kneaded. Resist adding wheat flour to firm it up — the softness is what keeps a loaf with no gluten to speak of from baking into a brick.
- CoolingLet it cool completely, several hours, before cutting. Warm rye-and-corn crumb tears and gums under the knife; it also slices better and tastes sweeter the next day.
"Thirded" or "third" bread is traditionally said to take its name from the New England practice of building a loaf from thirds — corn meal, rye and wheat — at a time when wheat was the costly import and rye and "Indian" corn were what a northern farm actually grew. Versions dropping the wheat entirely, as this one does, are the same family as rye-and-Indian bread and the steamed Boston brown bread that outlived it; molasses stands in for sugar because it came cheaply up from the West Indies trade.