Home › Recipes › Rye and Indian
Rye and Indian
No different method is needed but to change the ingredients of Boston Brown so as to leave out the graham and the flour and double the proportions of meal and rye in their place.
Bakers' rye loaves are made by the same method as French loaves, and will be found in that connection at a subsequent page.
The Best White Bread and How to Make it.
Archestratus, a friend of one of Pericles' sons; * * this great writer, during his travels, did not make inquiring into the manners of nations, since they always remain the same, but going into the laboratories where the delicacies of the table are prepared, he only held intercourse with those who could advance his pleasure.--Philosophical History of Cookery. The ardent dietetic morality which extolled the bread that was coarsest, brownest, stalest and most truly home-made, and caused fine white and fresh bread to be swallowed as if it were a sin against nature, is classed among the "Isms of forty years ago" in one of the January magazines. Dr. Sylvester Graham of Connecticut, started the reform, which, running to great lengths at first, has resulted in the long run, in a happy mean, a modifiction, and greater variety in the popular bill of fare. The people in great numbers, who find the white rolls and bread irresistible may reap satisfaction from finding so eminent an authority as the author of "Gastronomy" in their favor. His prescription, the groundwork of his cure for thinness, for "a young sylph, or other airy creature, who wishes to assume a more material form" is "first of all, make it a general role to eat nothing but newly-baked bread, especially the crumb, and plenty of it." And he had studied such matters all his life. But as there are dinners and dinners,--so Cardinal Richelieu remarks to his major domo, meaning that some are very bad,--so it should be said about bread. The rolls of Limet, of Rue de Richelieu, could not hurt anybody. On one occasion the writer was called upon as a probably competent judge to pass opinion on the work of one of the reputed very best bread makers. There is a dubious kind of excellence in this line as in everything else that does not feel able to stand alone but always wants somebody to keep saying it excels. Such was the case here. The bread was extremely fine, yet, I venture to say the people did not enjoy it except to look at, and felt that some essential quality was lacking. It was white as chalk and a good deal like it; fine-grained as delicate cake, but had no toughness nor elasticity and crumbled when broken, like meal. It had a sweetish insipidity of taste, instead of the hearty relishing wheat flavor of good bread. It was made so by an immense amount of kneading the wrong way.
These people did not invite instruction nor criticism, only praise. I said the bread was superlatively fine, and the lady was one of the best breadmakers in the world. That the bread was not good was a mental reservation. We all frequently make bread that is fine but not good, and they that have such for their regular diet sometimes find in a loaf of common bakers' bread a new revelation of how swee the taste of bread can be, and wonder whence springs the difference. It is not what the bakers put in the bread but the proper method of working.
Just the other day a magazinist spoke of good bread making as a lost art. A figure of speech, perhaps, or else the opinion of a lover of good bread whose experiences have been bad; but if there be any grounds for such an idea to rest on the cause may be found in the unwillingness of instructors in cookery to properly dwell upon so seemingly simple and self-evident a matter as the proper way of kneading dough. And very recently another intimated how many persons accustomed to "biscuit streaked with saleratus and heavy with lard, regard rolls white and light as newly-fallen snow as something belonging to the households of princes, to the King of France's Kitchen, but not to be freely eaten by common folks." Now it is cheaper to have good bread than bad and the bare formula for making it being so little and the understanding how so much, we are going to do our best to endeavor to draw attention to what the knack of making bread both good and fine consists in-yeast and flour being good to begin with.
It took one, otherwise excellent, pastry cook ten years to discover this knack for himself, but he was all the while the worst mystified man imaginable, because he had, when a boy, made rolls that people would eat in preference to anything else, while now every other kind of bread was preferred to his handsomest rolls The fault with them was the same as with the lady's fine, brittle and tasteless bread already spoken of.
This man had been shown how to work in a routine way in a large bakery without ever being impressed with any idea of the particular way being essential to good quality, and when, afterwards, in a French kitchen where ornamentation was run to the extreme at the expense often of good flavor, he exercised his ingenuity till he could make rolls in forty different fancy shapes, he found, after all, they were in little demand. He worked all the life out of the dough in making it into curliques. Then in a busy time a very common fellow came along and was set to make the rolls. He was too common even to have a name except a familiar Tom, Dick, or Harry and was quite unconcious that the rolls he made were the first that had ever been eaten with a real zest and favored with a constantly increasing demand in that house. But after that the fancy breads were neglected and there was less cry for toast. Even the "help"-excellent judges of what is good, although discretely silent-would steal the new man's rolls out of the corners of the pans as they passed-a thing never known to be done before, as long as a biscuit could be had. And all the difference was in two different ways of working the same materials The superiority of the common fellow's rolls and bread was all owing to his kneading the dough the right way.
This is a variation rather than a standalone formula: it sends you back to the book's Boston Brown bread and tells you to swap the flours. Everything hinges on knowing what the parent recipe does, since the essay that follows it is about white bread and offers no help.
- What the swap actually meansThe book's Boston Brown recipe is not reproduced here. Period Boston Brown formulas commonly combine cornmeal, rye and graham, moistened with molasses and soda or sour milk; this one evidently used white flour as well, since the direction is to leave out both the graham and the flour. Doubling the meal and rye in their place gives a batter of rye and cornmeal only, in whatever ratio the parent recipe set.
- Indian meal is cornmeal"Indian" in nineteenth-century American baking ordinarily means maize. Use a stoneground yellow or white cornmeal, medium grind; degerminated supermarket meal absorbs less liquid and gives a drier loaf.
- Rye flourPeriod rye was generally closer to what we would now call medium or dark rye than to the light sifted rye sold for sandwich loaves. Dark rye will keep the loaf moist and gives a stronger, earthier flavour.
- No gluten, no riseLittle gluten, little rise -- with the wheat gone, what remains is rye, whose gluten proteins form only a weak network, and cornmeal, which forms none. Expect a dense, close, pudding-like loaf rather than a domed one, and handle it as a thick batter rather than a kneaded dough.
- Steaming, not bakingBoston Brown and its rye-and-Indian relatives were generally steamed in a covered mould set in a kettle of simmering water, for several hours, with the mould left part empty to allow for swelling.
- SaleratusIf your Boston Brown formula calls for saleratus, that is the period leavening later replaced by baking soda; substitute soda in roughly the same quantity. It needs an acid alongside it: sour milk, buttermilk or molasses.
- MolassesIf the parent recipe calls for it, period cooking molasses was generally a dark grade. Modern unsulphured dark molasses is the nearest match; light or "fancy" molasses will taste thin and sweet.
- Yield and servingServing -- cut with a taut string or a serrated knife rather than pressing down with a blade, and serve warm with butter or beside baked beans.
"Rye and Indian" is the older and plainer relation of Boston Brown bread, and in New England it was long known as ryaninjun; "thirded" bread is a related but distinct loaf, made of three grains including wheat. Rye grew reliably in the northern colonies and maize grew everywhere, so the two carried a great deal of household baking while wheat flour stayed dearer; the addition of graham and white flour, as in the Boston Brown recipe this entry points back to, marks the later and more prosperous version. The essay that follows on the page is a separate matter entirely, a defence of fine white bread against the legacy of Sylvester Graham, the Connecticut-born preacher whose 1830s campaign for coarse unbolted flour gave graham flour its name. The writer treats that reform as a passing enthusiasm -- the page itself calls it one of the "Isms of forty years ago" -- and argues that the fault in bad white bread lies in the kneading rather than the flour, citing in passing the author of "Gastronomy," almost certainly Brillat-Savarin, whose regimen for thinness does recommend plenty of newly baked bread.