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Coarse Loaf
1/2 cup New Orleans molasses 1/2 cup brown sugar 1/2 cup corn meal 2 cups graham flour 1½ cups white flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 cup nuts or raisins 1 pint sour milk 2 teaspoons soda Pinch of salt Mix all the ingredients together, adding the soda dissolved in the sour milk last. Pour into a greased baking pan and bake in a slow oven about one hour.
A molasses-sweetened quick bread of the Boston brown bread family, leavened by the reaction of soda with sour milk. Nothing here is difficult, but three things in the original will trip up a modern cook: the oven, the milk, and the soda.
- Slow ovenBake at 300-325F. A dense molasses batter this wet needs the long, gentle heat; at 375F the crust sets and darkens well before the centre is done. One hour is a starting point — test with a skewer and expect up to 70 minutes.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Pasteurised milk left out will spoil rather than clabber. Use 2 cups of buttermilk, or 2 cups of milk with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left 10 minutes.
- Two teaspoons of soda is a lotTwo cups of buttermilk plus the molasses will carry about 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons of soda. At the full 2 teaspoons, with baking powder on top, the loaf can taste faintly soapy and turn very dark. Cutting the soda to 1 1/4 teaspoons is the single change most worth making.
- Graham flourCoarsely milled whole wheat, bran and germ included. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest current equivalent; ordinary whole wheat works but gives a smoother crumb than the name "coarse loaf" implies.
- New Orleans molassesLouisiana cane molasses, dark but not blackstrap. Standard dark molasses is right; blackstrap is too bitter here.
- Corn mealPlain yellow or white cornmeal, not a self-rising mix and not corn flour. It absorbs a good deal of the liquid and is what keeps the loaf from being merely a brown wheat bread.
- Pan and yieldThe batter comes to roughly 6 cups, more than one 9x5-inch loaf pan will hold at two-thirds full; two 8x4-inch pans are the safer division, and will bake faster than the hour given. Cool at least 20 minutes before slicing or the crumb tears.
- Mixing orderCombine the dry ingredients and the molasses first, then add the soda-and-sour-milk mixture and get it into the greased pan promptly. The gas is generated as soon as the two meet and will not wait.
- Filed oddlyThe page sits under "Frozen Desserts" in this loose-leaf book, which it plainly is not; in a binder of removable leaves a page can easily end up out of order.
Coarse loaf belongs to the broad family of New England molasses-and-graham quick breads related to Boston brown bread, which was traditionally steamed in a pudding mould rather than baked; here the mould is abandoned for a greased pan and the loaf goes into a slow oven instead. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the 1830s temperance and dietary reformer whose advocacy of unsifted wheat gave the coarse flour and later the cracker his name, and by the time of Mrs. Fryer's book it was ordinary pantry stock rather than reform food. The pairing of molasses with sour milk and soda is thrift as much as chemistry: molasses was the cheap sweetener, milk that had turned was not thrown away, and soda turned its acid into lift without the expense of eggs.