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Brown Bread (Tsp salt tbsp soda cup)
1 tsp. salt 3/4 tbsp. soda 3/4 cup molasses 1 pt. sour milk 1 cup corn meal, yellow 1 cup graham flour If sweet milk is used or water, use 1/4 cups and scant the soda. Makes one large loaf.
— Mabel A. Barton
A church-supper ingredient list with almost no method, typical of community cookbooks where the contributor assumed every reader had made brown bread before. The proportions are the useful part; the technique has to be supplied.
- No method is givenMix the dry ingredients, stir in molasses and sour milk, and treat it as a pour batter, not a kneaded dough. A pint of milk plus three-quarters of a cup of molasses against two cups of meal and flour gives something closer to a thick pancake batter than bread dough.
- Bake or steamA batter this wet is traditionally either steamed in a covered mould for two to three hours or baked in a greased loaf pan at 350F for about an hour, until a skewer comes out clean. Steaming gives the dark, moist, close crumb most people associate with brown bread; baking gives a drier loaf with a crust.
- Sour milkMilk naturally soured or clabbered, whose acid reacts with the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the usual modern stand-in; a pint is 2 cups.
- The sweet-milk note is garbledThe sweet-milk note looks garbled -- "If sweet milk is used or water, use 1/4 cups and scant the soda" appears to be missing a numeral, possibly 1 1/4 cups, though that is a guess. Sweet milk supplies none of the acid the sour milk did, but the molasses is acidic enough to keep some of the soda working, which is presumably why the direction is to scant it rather than drop it.
- Soda quantity3/4 tablespoon is 2 1/4 teaspoons, on the heavy side even for a pint of sour milk. If the finished loaf tastes soapy, reduce it to 1 1/2 teaspoons next time.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing on a supermarket shelf.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses rather than blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what a 1900s kitchen would have had on hand.
- ServingOne loaf, about eight to ten slices. Best sliced thin the day after and eaten with butter or cream cheese; it firms up considerably as it cools.
Brown bread of this kind is a New England quick bread: cornmeal and a coarse wheat or rye flour, sweetened and darkened with molasses, leavened with soda against sour milk rather than yeast. It is often associated with the era before commercial yeast was reliable and cheap, though soda breads like it persisted chiefly for speed: a loaf could be got onto the table in an afternoon with nothing more than a crock of turned milk and a jug of molasses left over from the West Indies trade. The steamed version, tied in a covered tin and set in a kettle of water, was the older form and is still the one paired with Saturday-night baked beans. Recipes like this one, credited by name to a contributor, are the backbone of church and society cookbooks such as the Philathea, where the point was as much to record whose bread was worth copying as to teach anyone the method.