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Boiled Corn Bread
One and one-fourth pints each of sweet milk and buttermilk or sour cream, half a pint molasses, one tea-spoon soda, three teaspoons cream tartar, one even table-spoon salt, one and a fourth pints each of corn meal and flour; sift the soda and cream tartar in the flour; mix all the ingredients thoroughly together and put in a buttered tin pail; cover closely, place in a kettle two-thirds full of boiling water; cover, and boil steadily for three hours, replenishing when needful with boiling water. To be eaten hot with butter. -Mrs. I. N. Burritt in "In the Kitchen."
This is a steamed bread of the Boston brown bread family, cooked in a covered pail set in simmering water rather than in an oven. The batter is loose, closer to a thick pancake batter than a dough, and that is correct.
- The measurements in cupsA pint is 2 cups, so this calls for 2 1/2 cups each sweet milk and buttermilk, 1 cup molasses, and 2 1/2 cups each cornmeal and flour. It is a very large batch, filling a 2-quart mold and then some; halving it is sensible for a modern household.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk beside it. Whole milk is the closest match to what a nineteenth-century kitchen would have poured.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether these are homemade baking powder. The usual home proportion was about one part soda to two of cream of tartar; this recipe uses rather more cream of tartar than that. If you substitute commercial double-acting baking powder, you still want the soda separately to neutralize the buttermilk and molasses.
- The buttered tin pailAny tall covered mold works: a 2-quart pudding basin, a lidded steamed-pudding mold, or a well-buttered coffee tin with foil tied over the top. Fill it no more than two-thirds, since the bread rises considerably and needs headroom under the lid.
- Keep the water simmering, not boiling hardKeep the water at a steady boil -- The recipe calls for a kettle two-thirds full of boiling water, covered, boiling steadily; keep it at a lively but not violent boil so water does not slosh past the lid, and top it up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- Three hours is not an exaggerationSteamed breads genuinely need this long, and the loaf is forgiving of an extra fifteen minutes. Test with a skewer to the center, then uncover and let it sit five minutes before turning out or the crumb tears.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of the period.
- Yield and servingThe full recipe makes a large loaf, or more batter than one ordinary mold will hold. The recipe says it is to be eaten hot with butter; leftovers are best sliced thick and re-steamed or fried in butter.
Boiled or steamed breads belong to a long American tradition of baking without an oven, whether because the household cooked over an open hearth, because a summer kitchen made oven heat unbearable, or because a wood range's firebox was already committed to the day's dinner. Cornmeal and molasses in a steamed loaf is the same formula behind New England brown bread, and its appearance in a Southern book like The Dixie Cook Book reflects how freely these late nineteenth-century compilations borrowed: the attribution to Mrs. I. N. Burritt in In the Kitchen points to another printed collection, though whether the receipt was lifted, contributed, or copied with permission is not clear. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing belongs to the era when cooks still mixed their own leavening, a method used alongside packaged baking powder rather than strictly before it.