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Indian Bread
1 1/2 cups Graham flour. 1 cup Indian meal. 1/2 tablespoon soda. 1 teaspoon salt ½ cup molasses 1⅔ cups milk Mix and steam same as Boston Brown Bread.
This is a variant entry that leans entirely on the Boston Brown Bread recipe printed alongside it, so the method has to be read across from there. The proportions as printed will not carry a loaf on their own.
- The quantities do not balanceAs printed, the milk is far out of proportion to the salt and molasses, and no meal or flour is listed at all. Treat the numbers here as unusable and work from a full Boston Brown Bread formula, which sets roughly three-quarters of a cup to a cup of molasses and about two cups of sour milk or buttermilk against three cups or so of meal and flour.
- Indian meal"Indian" in a nineteenth-century American bread title means cornmeal. A plain yellow or white cornmeal, not the degerminated instant sort, gives the right texture; stone-ground is probably closer to the period meal than a modern instant one.
- Steaming, not bakingThe hinge of the whole method. The batter goes into a greased mold or coffee-can filled about two-thirds, covered tightly with a lid or foil so condensation cannot drip in, then set on a rack in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the mold. Cover the pot and keep the water at a bare simmer, topping it up as it boils away.
- TimeReckon three to three and a half hours steaming for a quart mold; recipes of this family often specify the longer time. A short spell uncovered in a moderate oven will dry the crust. Understeamed brown bread is gummy at the center and does not improve on standing.
- The leaveningBrown breads of this family are raised with soda, activated by the acid in molasses and sour milk; the printed entry lists none, and full recipes of the type call for anywhere from a teaspoon to about a tablespoon. Sour milk or buttermilk is usual, but recipes of this period often allow sweet milk or water instead.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate. Grease the measuring cup first and it will pour out clean.
- Yield and servingA quart mold gives one round loaf, eight to ten slices. Cut it warm with a taut length of string rather than a knife, which drags and compresses the crumb, and serve with butter or baked beans.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England tradition of cooking without an oven: the covered mold sat in a pot over the same fire that held the bean crock, and the loaf was ready for Saturday supper. The word "Indian" in colonial and nineteenth-century American cookery simply meant maize, the grain colonists learned to use from Native people, and it survives in names like Indian pudding and Indian meal. Cookbooks of the period gather a cluster of these steamed loaves in their bread chapters, varying the ratio of cornmeal to rye and wheat, at a point when the domestic-science movement was trying to record and standardize dishes that had until then been carried by habit rather than measurement.