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Boston Brown Bread
1 cup corn-meal I 1 cups thick sour 1 cup Graham flour milk + cup molasses 1 teaspoonful soda teaspoonful salt Sift the meal and flour before measuring. Dissolve soda in little hot water, add to milk. Combine wet and dry materials, pour into greased mold (leaving room for bread to rise), cover with greased cover, and steam four hours. Take off cover and bake in oven half an hour. This will make one loaf.
A steamed brown bread of the standard New England type, leavened by the reaction of soda with sour milk rather than by yeast. The four-hour steam is the whole method; the half-hour in the oven only dries the crust.
- The measurements are unreliable as printedSeveral quantities in this copy have lost their fractions: the sour milk and the molasses both read as incomplete figures. Comparable brown breads of the period use about 1 1/2 cups sour milk and 1/2 cup molasses to 2 cups of dry meal and flour, but treat those as a reconstruction rather than what the book says.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the practical stand-in; sweet milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup also works, though it gives a slightly thinner batter.
- SodaBaking soda. Older books often call it saleratus, though that name originally covered potassium bicarbonate before sodium bicarbonate displaced it. Dissolving it in hot water before it meets the milk is not fussiness -- undissolved soda leaves bitter specks in a dark loaf where they are hard to see and easy to taste.
- Graham flourCoarse unsifted whole wheat, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; standard whole wheat flour is finer and gives a smoother, less characterful crumb.
- Sift before measuringThe instruction is deliberate. Cornmeal and Graham flour pack in the cup, and measuring unsifted can add appreciably more dry material than intended, giving a dense, dry loaf.
- The moldA one-pound coffee tin or a 1-quart pudding mold with a lid. Fill no more than two-thirds and grease the lid as well as the sides; the batter climbs and will glue itself to an unbuttered cover. Foil tied down with string substitutes for a lid.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover the pot, and keep it at a bare simmer. Check the water level hourly and top up with boiling water -- a pot that steams dry will scorch the bottom of the loaf.
- The oven finishThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven of about 350F suits the half hour. This drives off surface moisture and firms a crust that would otherwise be tacky; it is not where the bread cooks.
- Yield and servingOne loaf, roughly eight to ten slices. Cut it with a length of thread or a serrated knife rather than pressing down with a straight blade, and serve warm with butter or, in the traditional pairing, alongside baked beans.
Steamed brown bread is often said to have been a way of producing bread without relying on an oven: a covered mold in a pot of simmering water needed only a steady fire, and the combination of cornmeal, rye or Graham flour and molasses used what a northern farm actually had rather than the white wheat flour it did not. The pairing with Saturday baked beans is the association most people carry. Its appearance in a book of left-overs is a matter of placement more than method: this is a bread to be made, and the chapter it heads is concerned with what to do with the slices afterward.