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Steamed Brown Bread
2 cups graham flour. 1 cup corn meal. 1 teaspoon salt. 1 1/2 teaspoons soda. 3/4 cup molasses. 1 pint sour milk.
Steam 3 hours. Add raisins if you like.
A minimal recipe even by Mrs. Wilson's standards: she gives quantities and a steaming time and assumes you know the rest. The method is straightforward once you supply the mixing and the mold.
- MeasuresA pint of sour milk is 2 cups. The measured ingredients come to a little under 6 cups combined, so use a mold generous enough to hold that at no more than two-thirds full, to leave room for the rise.
- Sour milkThis means milk left to sour and clabber, as household milk routinely did before reliable refrigeration; it is not something you can buy now. Use buttermilk cup for cup; it supplies the acid the 1 1/2 teaspoons of soda need to work. Fresh milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar per cup is thinner but serviceable.
- Soda, not baking powderThe whole rise depends on the soda meeting the acid in the buttermilk, and it begins the moment they touch. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly first, stir in molasses and buttermilk just until combined, and get it into the steamer immediately.
- Graham flourCoarse-ground whole wheat, including bran and germ. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest current product; ordinary whole wheat flour works but gives a finer, less nubbly crumb.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses. Blackstrap is more bitter and more alkaline than what Mrs. Wilson had in mind and will throw off both flavor and the soda reaction.
- The steaming setupGrease the mold well, cover it tightly with a lid or foil tied down, and set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water coming halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a steady low boil and top it up with boiling water as it drops; the pot must not run dry over three hours.
- Doneness and finishThree hours is right for a full 1 1/2-quart mold; smaller cans are done in about 2 hours. A skewer should come out clean and the loaf should pull slightly from the sides. Uncover and dry the surface in a 350F oven for 10 minutes if it feels tacky.
- Yield and servingOne loaf, about 12 slices. Cut warm with a length of thread or dental floss drawn through rather than a knife, which drags the moist crumb. Serve with butter, or with baked beans.
- RaisinsIf you add them, 1/2 to 1 cup is the usual proportion. Toss them in the dry flour first so they stay suspended rather than settling to the bottom.
Steamed brown bread belongs to the New England tradition of breads cooked without an oven — in a covered mold set in a kettle of boiling water. The combination of cornmeal, whole-grain wheat and molasses is the same family as Boston brown bread, which usually adds rye and is the standing partner to a pot of baked beans. Mrs. Wilson's version is an economical one: it uses no eggs, no butter, no sugar and no white flour, and it turns sour milk into a leavening system by pairing it with soda. Her cookbook is generally associated with her food-conservation writing during the First World War, when sugar was conserved under voluntary programs rather than formal rationing, and recipes like this one — cheap grains, molasses for sweetening, and a cooking method that needed no fuel-hungry oven — sit comfortably alongside that work.