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Boston Brown Bread. Mrs. Dyer's
2 cups whole wheat flour. 1 cup water-ground meal. 1 teaspoon of salt. Sift together, and mix well, then add three-fourths cup dark molasses and 1 cup of butter milk. When ready to put in cans, add other half cup of milk, in which 2 level teaspoons of soda have been dissolved. For raisin bread, use one-half box of seeded raisins washed and pressed dry. For the fruit bread, 1 cup of mixed chopped fruits such as raisins, citron, cherries or pineapple.
To Steam: Fill one pound baking powder cans two-thirds full and place in vessel of warm water. Cover with several thicknesses of cloth and a top and steam three hours, adding more water if necessary. Premium brown bread.
A steamed pudding-style loaf built on soda and buttermilk rather than yeast, so the batter has to go into its molds and into the steam without delay. Everything else is straightforward.
- Do the soda last, and moveThe half cup of milk holding the dissolved soda goes in only when the molds are ready and the water is already warm. Once soda meets buttermilk and molasses the gas starts escaping, and a batter left standing on the counter steams up dense.
- Total liquidOne cup buttermilk plus the reserved half cup of milk, 1.5 cups in all. The finished batter should be pourable, closer to a thick pancake batter than a dough; add a spoonful more milk if the meal has drunk it up.
- Water-ground mealStone-ground cornmeal, coarser and still carrying the germ. Modern degerminated supermarket meal works but gives a blander, drier crumb; look for stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal and keep it in the freezer, since it goes rancid.
- The cansA one-pound baking powder can held roughly a pint, about 2 cups. Three 15-oz vegetable cans, well washed and heavily greased, come close, as do 2-cup pudding molds or wide-mouth pint jars. Expect around three molds from this batch. Most modern cans have an interior coating not intended for repeated cooking; a pudding mold or jar is the cleaner choice.
- Covering and steamingGrease the mold, fill two-thirds, and cap with greased parchment and foil tied down. In the original the several thicknesses of cloth and a top appear to cover the steaming vessel rather than the individual cans. Set the molds on a rack in a pot with warm water reaching halfway up their sides, keep it at a bare simmer, lid on, and top up with boiling water as it drops.
- When it is doneThree hours is right for pint molds. A skewer should come out clean and the center should read 190-200F. Let the loaves stand ten minutes, then run a knife around and slide them out; slice with a sawing motion or a length of thread, as the crumb is moist and tears under pressure.
- Half a box of raisinsAn unhelpful measure now. Packaged seeded raisins of the period ran somewhere in the region of 12 to 16 ounces, so read it as roughly 6 to 8 ounces, about 1 to 1.5 cups. Washing and drying them keeps them from streaking the batter.
- ServingBest warm, cut thick, with butter or cream cheese, and traditionally alongside baked beans. It keeps several days wrapped, and reheats well in its mold over steam for 15 minutes.
Steamed brown bread is a New England habit older than the reliable home oven: a batter of coarse meal and molasses cooked for hours over water on the hearth or stove, needing no baking chamber at all. The older versions were "rye and Indian" (rye flour with cornmeal, Indian meal being the colonial name for corn), and molasses did the sweetening because it arrived cheaply through the West Indies trade while refined sugar did not. Mrs. Dyer's version swaps whole wheat for the rye and leans on baking soda and buttermilk; chemical leavening in brown bread was common well before 1900, so that is not by itself a firm date, though steaming in one-pound baking powder cans points to a late nineteenth or early twentieth century household. The recipe reads as a contributed one, which would account for the attribution and the brisk, slightly telegraphic phrasing.