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Steamed Graham Bread
3 cups Arlington meal 1 cup flour 3½ teaspoons soda 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup molasses (scant) 2½ cups sour milk Mix same as Boston Brown Bread and steam four hours. This bread may often be eaten when bread containing corn meal could not be digested.
A steamed brown bread with graham meal standing in for the usual cornmeal, cooked in a covered mold rather than an oven. Two things in the text need attention before you start: the soda quantity as printed and the meaning of "Arlington meal."
- On the sodaThe printed page gives 3½ teaspoons soda, which is what our text now reads. That is a generous amount, but it is in keeping with the four cups of meal and flour and the two and a half cups of sour milk it has to work against; cooks preferring a milder crumb can cut it to about a teaspoon and a half.
- Arlington mealA period name for a finely ground entire-wheat or graham meal; whether it was a proprietary brand is not clear. Modern graham flour is the direct substitute; whole-wheat flour works, though it gives a slightly denser crumb.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup. Pasteurized milk left on the counter simply spoils and will not do.
- MolassesUnsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the period product. "Scant" means just under a level cup.
- Mixing methodThe recipe defers to the book's Boston Brown Bread. In general: combine the dry ingredients, stir in the molasses and sour milk, and work quickly — the soda begins reacting the moment it meets the acid.
- The moldButter a lidded pudding mold or a 1-lb coffee tin and fill it no more than two-thirds; the loaf rises considerably. Cover tightly with the lid or buttered foil tied down, or condensed steam will waterlog the top.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep kettle with boiling water reaching halfway up its side, cover, and keep the water at a steady simmer for the full four hours, topping up with boiling water as it drops. A slip cooker or Instant Pot on steam does the same job.
- Finishing and yieldThe original calls only for steaming, though the loaf may optionally be unmolded and dried briefly in a moderate oven so the surface firms. This quantity of batter needs a mold of about two quarts; it slices best with a taut string or serrated knife, warm.
Graham meal takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the New England temperance lecturer of the 1830s whose dietary preaching made coarse unbolted wheat a moral as much as a nutritional matter; by the time this book appeared the term had settled into ordinary commercial use. Steaming rather than baking was a genuinely practical choice in nineteenth-century New England kitchens, where the range firebox was in use all day for other purposes and a covered mold could sit in a kettle without competing for oven space — the same logic that produced Boston brown bread and the long line of steamed puddings beside it. The closing note about digestion reflects a widespread contemporary belief that cornmeal was hard on delicate stomachs, a claim you meet often in period cookbooks and invalid-cookery chapters and which is better read as a window on Victorian dietary anxiety than as physiology.