Home › Bread, Rolls and Muffins › Nut Bread (Cups white Indian meal cups)
Nut Bread (Cups white Indian meal cups)
3 cups white Indian meal 2 cups rye 1 large cup molasses 1 tsp. soda Steam 4 hours or more. 1 egg slightly beaten 1 cup nut meats 1 cup sugar 1 cup milk
This is a steamed brown bread in the New England manner, with nuts and sugar added. The ingredient list as printed runs the steaming instruction into the middle of it; read the whole list first, mix everything, then steam.
- White Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal, and "white" specifies white corn rather than yellow. Stone-ground white cornmeal, medium grind, is the closest thing on a modern shelf; the flavour is milder and the crumb paler than yellow meal would give.
- "2 cups rye"Rye flour or rye meal; the recipe does not say which, and brown breads of this period were made with either. Light or medium rye is the safer choice; dark rye will make a heavier, more sour loaf.
- The liquid is short as printedThe liquid looks short as printed -- One cup of milk plus one cup of molasses seems unlikely to wet five cups of meal and flour into a pourable batter. Expect to add milk, perhaps another cup or more, until the batter drops thickly from the spoon.
- Soda and no acidA teaspoon of soda is the only leavening. Molasses supplies enough acidity to react with it, which is why these breads use molasses rather than sugar syrup; if you use sour milk or buttermilk in place of sweet milk, the rise improves.
- No saltThe recipe omits it, as many of these lists do. A teaspoon is worth adding — without it the sweetness reads flat.
- How to steamFill greased moulds or coffee-tin-sized cans two-thirds full, cover tightly with foil or a lid, stand them on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up as it goes; the recipe asks for four hours or more, and a skewer should come out clean.
- Drying the loavesSome cooks uncover the moulds after steaming and set them briefly in a low oven so the surface dries and the loaf slips out cleanly; the recipe itself says nothing of this.
- Yield and servingThis makes a large batch; fill moulds or cans two-thirds full and use as many as the batter requires. It slices best cold, with a serrated knife or a length of thread, and is traditionally eaten with butter or cream cheese; leftovers steam back to life in minutes.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England tradition often said to be older than the ovens most households eventually got: a batter of cornmeal with rye or wheat, sweetened with molasses, cooked for hours over water in a covered mould rather than baked. It survived long after ovens were common because it kept well, needed no yeast, and went with baked beans on Saturday night. The Philathea class cookbooks were fundraising collections compiled by young women's Bible study classes in the early twentieth century, and their bread sections are full of exactly this sort of contributed shorthand method, written by someone who assumed her reader had steamed a brown bread before. The addition of nuts, sugar and an egg here nudges an austere staple toward the sweet nut breads that seem to have been popular in American church cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s.