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Boston Brown Bread
1 cup rye meal 1 cup granulated corn meal 1 cup Graham flour ¾ tablespoon soda 1 teaspoon salt ¾ cup molasses 2 cups sour milk, or 1¾ cups sweet milk or water Mix and sift dry ingredients, add molasses and milk, stir until well mixed, turn into a well-buttered mould, and steam three and one-half hours. The cover should be buttered before being placed on mould, and then tied down with string; otherwise the bread in rising might force off cover. Mould should never be filled more than two-thirds full. A melon-mould or one-pound baking powder boxes make the most attractive-shaped loaves, but a five-pound lard pail answers the purpose. For steaming, place mould on a trivet in kettle containing boiling water, allowing water to come half-way up around mould, cover closely, and steam, adding, as needed, more boiling water.
A classic steamed brown bread from Fannie Farmer's kitchen: no oven, no yeast, just soda, molasses and a long spell over boiling water. The method is forgiving, but the mould and the water level are not.
- The fractionsThe soda is three-quarters of a tablespoon (about 2¼ teaspoons) and the sweet-milk option is 1¾ cups. Two cups of sour milk carries acid to react with the soda, and buttermilk is the closest modern stand-in for it; the recipe itself also allows sweet milk or water, where the molasses supplies some acidity.
- Rye meal and Graham flourRye meal is coarse whole rye, not the pale rye flour sold for sandwich loaves. Graham flour is whole wheat, stone-ground and slightly coarser than modern whole-wheat flour, which substitutes directly.
- Granulated corn mealThis means a coarser, medium-grind meal, not corn flour and not the degerminated fine kind sold for cornbread mixes; the recipe does not specify colour. Coarser meal gives the loaf its characteristic grit.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses. Blackstrap is more bitter than what was meant here and will make the loaf darker and harsher.
- The mouldAny straight-sided, lidded metal vessel filled no more than two-thirds works, but this quantity of batter needs roughly two quarts of capacity in total: a large pudding mould, several 1-lb tins, or a heatproof bowl covered with buttered foil and tied. Butter the lid as directed; the dough climbs and will lift an unsecured cover.
- Steaming setupSet the mould on a trivet or folded towel in a deep pot, water halfway up the sides, lid on. Keep the water at a steady low boil and top up with boiling water only, never cold, or the loaf stalls.
- Time and donenessThree and a half hours is right for a single large mould; 1-lb tins are done in about 2 hours. The loaf is set when a skewer comes out clean and the top feels springy rather than wet.
- Finishing and yieldUnmould while warm, and cut with a taut string or serrated knife rather than pressing down with a blade. Yield depends entirely on how thickly you slice; a short spell in a moderate oven to dry the crust is a modern addition, as the original uses no oven.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England tradition of cooking without an oven, on a hearth or over a single stove burner, and the combination of rye, cornmeal and wheat is a direct descendant of colonial "rye and Indian" loaves made when wheat flour was scarce and expensive. Molasses did the sweetening because it arrived cheaply from the West Indies trade, and soda replaced the older reliance on long-fermented sourdough once chemical leavening became a pantry staple in the mid-nineteenth century. The dish is fixed in memory as the partner to Saturday-night baked beans: both cooked slowly and unattended, both ready for a household observing a Sunday with as little kitchen work as possible. The mention of a five-pound lard pail as a serviceable mould is a good marker of the period, when tins came into the kitchen as food containers and stayed on as equipment.