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Steamed Corn Bread
Two cups each corn meal, Graham flour and sour milk, twothirds cup molasses, one tea-spoon soda; steam two hours and a half. -Mrs. Jennie Guthrie Cherry, Newark.
A plain steamed brown bread of the type New England cooks made in a lidded mold set in a kettle of simmering water. The recipe assumes you know the setup, so most of the work is filling in the equipment and the leavening chemistry.
- Sour milkThis means genuinely soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Buttermilk is the direct modern equivalent; 2 cups of milk with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar, left 10 minutes, also works.
- SodaOne teaspoon of soda for 2 cups of buttermilk plus 2/3 cup molasses is on the low side by modern standards, and the bread will be dense and dark rather than light. If you want more lift, 1 1/2 teaspoons is defensible, but it should not go higher or the crumb turns soapy.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground and including the bran and germ, named for Sylvester Graham. Ordinary whole-wheat flour substitutes directly; the texture is finer and the flavor close, if a little less nutty.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what an 1880s kitchen would have poured. Sorghum syrup, widely used in the South in this period, is another reasonable option.
- No salt in the originalThe recipe omits it entirely. Add 1 teaspoon; without it the bread tastes flat.
- The mold and the steamingGrease a 1 1/2 to 2 quart pudding mold or two 1 lb coffee cans, fill no more than two-thirds full, and cover tightly with a lid or foil tied down. Set on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the mold, cover the pot, and keep the water at a bare simmer, topping up with boiling water as it drops.
- Time and donenessTwo and a half hours is right for a single large mold; smaller cans are done in about 1 3/4 hours. A skewer should come out clean and the loaf should pull slightly from the sides. Steamed breads do not brown, so do not judge by color.
- Finishing and yieldUncover and let the loaf stand in the mold 10 minutes before turning out, then dry it a few minutes in a 350F oven if the surface is tacky. It makes one substantial loaf, roughly 10 to 12 slices, and cuts most cleanly with a length of thread rather than a knife.
Steamed brown breads belong to a long tradition of baking without an oven: the covered mold in a kettle of water gave a reliable moist heat over an open fire or on a stovetop, and it was the standard method for both puddings and coarse breads well into the nineteenth century. The combination of cornmeal, a whole-grain wheat flour, molasses and soured milk raised with soda is the same family as New England's better-known thirds bread and Boston brown bread, which usually adds rye. Its appearance in The Dixie Cook Book, credited to a contributor in Newark, is a reminder that these late-century American compilations were not the record of a single regional kitchen; The Dixie Cook Book in fact leaned heavily on an earlier Midwestern compilation, which better explains a Newark contributor. The Graham flour is no help in dating it: coarse unsifted wheat meal was promoted from the 1830s onward by the dietary reformer Sylvester Graham, and by the 1880s it was an unremarkable pantry staple sold under his name.