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Made with Baking Powder (Pounds of corn meal quart)
2 pounds of corn meal. 1 quart of boiling water. 1 cupful of dark molasses. 1 pint of cold milk or water. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 6 teaspoonfuls of baking powder. 1 pound of graham. 1 pound of white flour.
Scald the meal with the boiling water. Add the molasses and then rest of the ingredients-the powder being mixed in the flour. Beat up thoroughly. It makes soft dough. Put it in 2 or 3 iron pails having lids and steam 5 hours or more, then bake about 20 minutes.
Hotel providers who would have brown bread by these easy methods always, need to provide a set of pails that will stand baking, having bales and lids. They should last for years and require to be made of the best Russia iron, as these properly cared for, greased while hot and wiped out, never discolor the bread. 5 inches across, 8 inches deep.
A large-batch steamed brown bread, leavened with baking powder rather than the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method. The quantities are hotel scale: expect two or three loaves of about two pounds each.
- Weigh, don't scoop2 lb cornmeal is roughly 6 to 7 cups, 1 lb graham about 3 1/2 cups, 1 lb white flour about 3 1/2 to 4 cups. The recipe calls the result a soft dough, so a scale is the surest route with this ratio of meal to liquid.
- Graham flourGraham is coarse whole-wheat flour, milled with the bran and germ. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; standard fine whole-wheat flour works but gives a smoother, less nubbly crumb.
- Scald the meal firstThis is the hinge. Pouring the boiling quart over the cornmeal gelatinizes the starch and softens the hull, which is what keeps steamed brown bread from tasting gritty. Let it sit until it stops steaming hard before the molasses and milk go in, or the baking powder will spend itself in the hot mash.
- Molasses"Dark molasses" here means ordinary full-flavored cooking molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter.
- The pailsRussia iron was a polished sheet iron prized for not staining bread. Straight-sided covered pudding molds, or greased 1 lb coffee tins covered with buttered foil tied down, do the same job. Fill no more than two-thirds so the loaf has room to climb.
- Steaming timeThe book says five hours or more; a mold this size may be done sooner, so test with a skewer that comes out clean rather than relying on the clock. Keep the water at a simmer, a third of the way up the molds, and top up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- The final bakeThe 20 minutes in the oven is to dry the crust after the steam, not to cook the loaf through. The book gives no temperature; uncover the molds and use a moderate oven, around 350F, then turn the bread out while it is still warm.
- Yield and servingTwo or three loaves, 20 or more slices each. Cut with a taut string or a serrated knife rather than pressing down with a blade, and serve warm with butter or alongside baked beans.
Steamed brown bread of cornmeal, wheat and molasses is the New England loaf that traveled with baked beans, and it is old enough that its earliest versions were leavened by sour milk and saleratus, by yeast, or, it is often said, by nothing at all, the steam and the long cooking doing the work. This recipe sits at the moment when commercial baking powder had become cheap and standard in professional kitchens, and cooks were rewriting inherited formulas around it: the heading "Made with Baking Powder" is the selling point. The closing note about iron pails is a reminder that this is a caterer's book rather than a housewife's. A hotel steward serving brown bread daily wanted vessels bought once and kept for years, and the instruction to grease them while hot and wipe them out is the same seasoning discipline applied to cast iron. Russia iron, a polished sheet iron named for its Russian origin but by then also made elsewhere to the same finish, was widely held to be the best available for such work before rolled steel and tinned wares displaced it.