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Boston Brown Bread
1 cup entire wheat or graham flour 1 cup corn meal 1 cup rye meal or ground rolled oats 5 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup molasses 1 1/3 cups milk Mix thoroughly dry ingredients; add molasses to milk, and add to dry ingredients; beat thoroughly and put into greased moulds 2/3 full. Steam 3 1/2 hours; remove covers and bake long enough to dry the top.
A steamed quick-bread from a baking powder company's promotional cookbook, replacing the older yeast- or soda-and-sour-milk versions. Nothing here is difficult, but the steaming setup and the moulds need translating.
- The mouldsTraditionally 1-lb coffee tins or purpose-made cylindrical brown bread moulds with lids. Two well-greased 1-lb cans or a 1 1/2-quart pudding basin work; fill only two-thirds full and cover tightly with greased foil tied down, since the batter climbs as it steams.
- Steaming, not boilingStand the moulds on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up their sides, cover, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates — water dropping below the rack is the usual cause of a scorched, dense loaf.
- Three and a half hours is realThat is not an exaggeration for a full-sized mould. Smaller cans will be done in about 2 to 2 1/2 hours; test with a skewer, which should come out clean and the loaf should feel springy through the foil.
- Drying the topThe final oven stage is short and uncovered, just to set the sticky crown. The recipe gives no temperature or time, only 'long enough to dry the top', so use a moderate oven and judge by eye. Do not treat it as a baking step.
- Rye mealCoarser than modern rye flour and now sold as rye meal or pumpernickel flour at mills and health food shops. Dark rye flour is the nearest common substitute; the rolled-oats alternative the recipe offers means oats ground to a coarse flour, not whole flakes.
- Entire wheat flourPeriod name for whole wheat. Graham flour, still sold under that name, is a coarser whole-wheat grind and gives a rougher crumb.
- Baking powder quantityFive teaspoons in three cups of flour is high by current standards but appropriate here — this is a company book selling baking powder, and the dense, molasses-heavy batter needs the lift with no yeast and a long, slow steam.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the corn meal. Measuring it into the oiled cup used for the milk saves scraping.
- Yield and servingRoughly two 1-lb loaves, or about 16 slices. Turn out while warm, cool 10 minutes, and cut with a length of string or thread rather than a knife, which tears the moist crumb. Baked beans are the traditional companion; cream cheese is a common later pairing.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England tradition of cooking without an oven: a batter of the three grains a farmhouse actually had — corn, rye and wheat — set over the fire in a covered pot all afternoon, sweetened with molasses that arrived in Boston by the barrel through the West Indies trade. The pairing with Saturday-night baked beans is generally traced to Sabbath observance, when the day's cooking had to be started in advance and left to look after itself. Notable in this version is the chemical leavening, though baking-powder and saleratus brown breads were already circulating in the later nineteenth century: older receipts rely on yeast, or on saleratus reacting with sour milk. Royal's book, like the flour and baking powder pamphlets that flooded American kitchens from the 1890s onward, exists to show that the branded tin could do the work, and five teaspoons tells you plainly who was paying for the page.