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New England Brown Bread
1½ cups stale bread 3¼ cups cold water 3/4 cup molasses 1½ teaspoons salt Rye meal Granulated corn meal Graham flour 3 teaspoons soda } 1½ cups each Soak bread in two cups of the water over night. In the morning rub through colander, add molasses, dry ingredients mixed and sifted, and remaining water. Stir until well mixed, fill buttered one-pound baking-powder boxes twothirds full, cover, and steam two hours. 1½ cups Graham flour 1 cup Indian meal ½ tablespoon soda
A steamed, not baked, brown bread: the batter is poured into closed tins and cooked in a covered kettle of simmering water. Everything about the texture depends on that moist, gentle heat.
- The bracket in the ingredient listRye meal, granulated corn meal and graham flour are grouped together and take the same measure -- 1½ cups of each. The soda is separate at 3 teaspoons for the full batch.
- Indian meal and granulated corn mealBoth mean cornmeal. "Granulated" indicates a medium, gritty grind rather than the fine flour-like meal; a standard yellow or white cornmeal works. Graham flour is coarse whole-wheat, and stone-ground whole wheat substitutes directly.
- The stale breadSoaking and sieving old bread is the point of this version -- it is a thrift bread. Use plain white or wheat loaf, crusts included, and press it through a colander or sieve after soaking so no lumps survive into the batter.
- Steaming vesselsOne-pound baking-powder boxes are gone. Clean 15-oz cans, a 1-quart pudding mould, or wide-mouth pint jars serve; butter them, fill two-thirds full to allow for rise, and cover tightly with buttered foil tied down. Set on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the tins, lid on, water kept at a bare simmer, topped up as it falls.
- Two hours, then dry offTwo hours of steaming sets the loaf but can leave the surface damp. The recipe itself stops at the steaming; if you want a firmer crust, uncover and put the tins in a moderate oven for a few minutes before turning out.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter. There is no other sweetener in the loaf, so the molasses carries the whole flavour.
- Working quicklySoda plus molasses begins reacting the moment they meet. Mix, fill and get the tins into the steam without delay or the rise is spent before the heat reaches it.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; expect several small loaves from one-pound tins. Serve warm in thick slices cut with a taut string rather than a knife, traditionally alongside baked beans, with butter or cream cheese.
Steamed brown bread is the traditional partner to Boston baked beans, and its three-grain formula -- rye, corn and wheat -- draws on grains long associated with New England cookery, rye and corn especially. Molasses stood in for sugar in part because it came north cheaply in the West Indies trade. This version, built on soaked stale bread, belongs to the same frugal impulse as the rest of the bread chapter, where nothing edible was thrown away.