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Syrup
3 cups light-brown 2 cups cold water sugar Cook sugar and water together, stirring until sugar is melted. Skim well while boiling. Boil for about thirty minutes, or until a little of the liquid put on cold saucer will thicken. Syrup may be flavored with maple, using part maple sugar.
Brewis (from Boston Brown Bread) Take dry Boston brown bread and break into small pieces, having two cupfuls. Put into saucepan, add milk enough to cover (one pint or more). Let soak awhile on back of stove; when all is soft draw saucepan forward and let simmer until milk is absorbed. Add a little salt and a tablespoonful of butter. Serve with cream.
Two items run together here: a plain brown-sugar syrup, and brewis, a milk-soaked bread dish for using up the end of a loaf of Boston brown bread. The syrup is meant to be poured over the brewis or over other leftover-bread dishes in this chapter.
- The garbled ingredient listThe original sets the quantities in two columns that have collapsed into one line. It reads: 3 cups light-brown sugar, 2 cups cold water.
- Syrup yield and consistencyThirty minutes of open boiling drives off much of the water; expect roughly two to two and a half cups, depending on pan and heat. The cold-saucer test is checking for a syrup that clings and thickens as it cools, not a candy stage; a thermometer reading in the region of 220-225F is a rough guide to the same point.
- SkimmingLess refined brown sugar of the period threw a grey scum of impurities. Most modern light brown sugar is refined sugar with molasses added back and produces almost nothing to skim, so the instruction is largely obsolete.
- Maple sugarGranulated maple sugar is still sold but is expensive; replacing part of the brown sugar with it, as the recipe says, gives the flavour intended. Maple syrup is not an equal swap here, since it brings its own water and will lengthen the boil.
- StorageThe syrup keeps several weeks refrigerated in a clean jar. If it crystallises, warm it gently with a spoonful of water.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood or coal range the back was the coolest zone. Use the lowest burner setting, or set the pan over a pan of hot water, so the bread hydrates without the milk scorching.
- Brewis proportionsTwo cups of broken dry brown bread to a pint of milk. Brown bread is dense and steamed rather than baked, so it absorbs a great deal; add more milk if the pieces are still firm after soaking.
- Brewis yieldServes two generously as a breakfast or supper dish. It should be thick and spoonable, closer to a bread porridge than a soup, and it wants the salt more than you expect.
Brewis is an old name in English cookery: it comes through Middle English forms borrowed from Old French words for broth, and originally meant any bread sopped in liquid, apparently the same root that gives Scots brose. In New England the name was commonly applied to this treatment of stale brown bread in milk, and coastal Newfoundland kept a different branch of the family, hard bread soaked and served with salt cod as fish and brewis. That it appears here in a chapter on left-over bread fits the household-management literature of this period, in which wasting food was a moral matter as much as an economic one, and a dish that turned a hard end of loaf into a hot supper with milk, butter and a spoonful of syrup needed no defending.