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Steamed Graham Bread (Mix cups Graham flour cup)
Mix 3 cups Graham flour, 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 3 teaspoons soda, 1 cup molasses, 2½ cups sour milk. Cook same as Boston brown bread.
NOTE-For steaming vegetables a cheesecloth bag can easily be made with shirr string. An ordinary steamer can be used to steam meats or bread, or a special kettle for use in Fireless Cookers, is now carried by some of the large hardware firms. Whenever it is necessary to prepare food in less time than is required in the directions, take the kettle out of the cooker after it has been in one-half the time in which you have to cook in, and boil hard on a stove for 5 minutes; then put back into the cooker until time to serve. By so doing the cooking can be done in the cooker about as quickly as on the stove. Ordinarily, food should be left in the cooker at least twice as long as it takes to cook it on a stove. This is not an objectionable feature, as there is no fuel consumed and the secret of good cooking is slow and thorough cooking. For complete Time Table, see pages 68-69.
A batter bread leavened entirely by soda reacting with sour milk and molasses, steamed rather than baked. The original assumes you already know the Boston brown bread method, which is the whole technique.
- "Cook same as Boston brown bread"Grease two or three 1-quart molds or coffee tins, fill them two-thirds full, cover tightly with greased foil or lids, and set them on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Steam covered, adding boiling water as it drops, about 3 hours; a skewer should come out clean. Loosen and unmold while warm.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat with the bran and germ left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern whole wheat flour works, though it is finer; a stone-ground whole wheat gives the closer texture.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk from the refrigerator. Use cultured buttermilk, or stir 2½ tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar into 2½ cups of whole milk and let it stand 10 minutes. The acid is what drives the soda.
- The soda is deliberate but generousThree teaspoons for four cups of flour is at the top of the usual range. Buttermilk and molasses together supply plenty of acid to neutralize it, but level the spoons carefully; excess soda leaves a soapy taste and a grey crumb.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses rather than blackstrap, which is bitter. Light molasses gives a milder loaf.
- MixingCombine the dry ingredients thoroughly first, then add molasses and sour milk and stir only until no dry flour remains. The batter should be thick and pourable, closer to a heavy cake batter than a dough.
- The fireless cooker noteA fireless cooker was an insulated box in which a preheated stone or a pot brought to a hard boil finished cooking off retained heat. The recipe's advice to take the kettle out halfway and boil hard for 5 minutes is offered as a way to shorten the total cooking time, and is not needed for steamed bread on a stovetop. A slow cooker on high with water in the crock is the nearest modern equivalent.
- Yield and servingTwo or three small loaves. Steamed breads slice cleanest with a length of thread drawn through the loaf rather than a knife. Serve warm with butter, or with baked beans in the New England fashion.
Steamed breads belong to a New England tradition that predates reliable home ovens: a covered mold set in a kettle of simmering water cooks evenly over a low fire and needs no bake-oven at all. The soda-and-molasses version, of which Boston brown bread is the best known, spread through nineteenth-century American cookbooks and was still standard household fare when this book was compiled. The graham flour marks a second influence: Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer of the 1830s, campaigned for unbolted whole wheat, and by 1900 "graham" had passed out of his reform movement and into ordinary grocery vocabulary as simply the name for coarse whole wheat flour. The long fireless-cooker note attached to the recipe reflects a brief but real enthusiasm of the 1900s and 1910s for insulated cookers marketed as fuel-saving devices for the household kitchen.