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Boston Brown Bread (Mix one cup of wheat flour cup)
Mix one cup of wheat flour, 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup of rye or graham flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons soda; then add 1 cup sour milk, 3/4 cup molasses. Pour into a small pail about 3/4 full. Place on rack in large kettle surrounded with boiling water. Boil on flame stove 20 minutes. Remove to cabinet for 5 hours or more. By adding ½ cup of raisins, you have fruit bread.
A standard New England thirds bread, written for a fireless cooker — the "cabinet" is an insulated box that finishes the loaf on retained heat. Without one, the whole cook has to happen over steam.
- The cabinet, and what to do insteadA fireless cooker is a lidded insulated chest, sometimes with preheated soapstone discs, that holds a boiled pail hot for hours. Lacking one, keep the pail on its rack in the covered kettle over a bare simmer for about 3 hours, topping up with boiling water so the level stays halfway up the mold. Twenty minutes of boiling followed by five hours in an ordinary uninsulated pot — no cooker — is unlikely to set the center.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup; sour cream thinned to buttermilk consistency also works. Modern milk that has gone off is spoiled, not soured, and should be discarded.
- Two teaspoons of sodaThat is a heavy hand by current standards, but molasses and buttermilk together supply a great deal of acid, and there is no other leavening. Mix the batter and get it into the pail promptly — the gas starts as soon as the wet meets the dry.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter and will dominate the loaf. Grease the measuring cup and the molasses slides out clean.
- The floursGraham flour is coarse whole wheat, still sold under that name; rye should be a medium or dark rye, not light. Cornmeal here is ordinary yellow or white meal, not the fine degerminated sort — a stone-ground meal gives the characteristic grain.
- The pailAny straight-sided mold does: a coffee can, a pudding basin, a lidded tin. It has to be big enough that the batter comes only three-quarters of the way up, as the recipe specifies — this quantity makes roughly a quart of batter, so a two-quart mold, or two smaller ones. Grease it well and cover it — a lid or foil tied down with string keeps condensation off the top of the loaf.
- Yield and servingAbout ten slices. Turn out while warm, cool a few minutes so it firms, then slice with a length of thread or a serrated knife rather than pressing down with a blade. It is traditionally eaten with baked beans, and reheats well by steaming.
- RaisinsToss the half cup in flour before folding them through, or they sink to what becomes the bottom of the loaf during the long steam.
Boston brown bread belongs to the old New England habit of "thirds" — equal parts wheat, rye and cornmeal — a mix that made sense when rye and maize grew readily in the region and wheat had to be brought in. Steaming rather than baking is generally traced to kitchens where a hot oven was an occasional event but a kettle was always on, and it gives the bread its dense, moist, almost pudding-like crumb. Its pairing with baked beans is a Saturday-supper convention of the same tradition. What dates this particular version is the last line: the loaf is boiled twenty minutes and then moved to a "cabinet," meaning a fireless cooker, the insulated retained-heat box that was widely promoted in the early twentieth century as a fuel-saving appliance and appears throughout household cookbooks of that period.