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Brown Bread
One pint corn meal, 1 pint rye flour, 1 teaspoon brown sugar, one teaspoon salt, two teaspoons baking power, one tablespoon butter or lard, ¾ pint milk. Sift. together corn meal, rye flour, sugar, salt and powder. Rub in the shortening; add the milk and mix all into a batter. Put into greased tin and bake about forty minutes in a rather hot oven. Cover at first with paper.
A quick brown bread leavened with baking powder rather than yeast or a long steaming, so it comes together in the time the oven takes to heat. One figure in the original is clearly a misprint and needs a decision before you start.
- The milk quantity"4 pint milk" cannot be right against 2 pints of dry meal — that would be soup. It is almost certainly a compositor's error for ½ pint or ¾ pint. Start with 1½ cups and add more only until you have a thick, spoonable batter that mounds rather than pours.
- Measuring by pintA pint here is a dry measure of volume, 2 cups. So the recipe is 2 cups cornmeal and 2 cups rye flour — roughly 10 oz and 8 oz by weight, since rye is lighter than cornmeal.
- "Baking power"A typesetting slip for baking powder. Two teaspoons for four cups of meal is on the light side by modern practice; two and a half to three teaspoons gives a better rise, and modern double-acting powder behaves more forgivingly than the single-acting product of the period.
- Rye flourUse medium or dark rye. The white rye common in some supermarkets is closer to wheat flour in flavour and will lose the sour, earthy note that makes this brown bread rather than cornbread.
- "A rather hot oven"Read that as 400–425F. At the low end of that range the interior sets before the crust hardens, which matters with a coarse, low-gluten batter.
- The paper coverThis is the instruction that decides whether the loaf works. Cornmeal and rye crust quickly and can seal into a dark shell while the middle stays raw; lay a sheet of parchment or foil loosely over the tin for the first 25 minutes, then remove it to colour the top.
- Tin and donenessA greased 8x4 or 9x5 loaf tin suits the quantity. Forty minutes is a fair estimate, but test with a skewer — coarse meals hold moisture and can read done at the edges while the centre is still wet.
- Yield and servingOne loaf, about ten slices. It is a supper bread rather than a sweet one: a single teaspoon of sugar is for balance, not sweetness. Best warm with butter, and better still toasted the next day, as it stales fast.
Baking-powder brown bread of this kind is the quick cousin of New England steamed brown bread, the cornmeal-and-rye loaf tied in a cloth or sealed in a tin and set over water for three or four hours. Rye and "Indian" cornmeal were the everyday grains of the northern colonies, where wheat grew poorly and had to be bought, and the pairing outlived its economic necessity to become a regional taste. Once chemical leavening was cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century, cookbooks began offering versions like this one that skipped the steaming altogether — a change of forty minutes for four hours.