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Boston Brown Bread
Mrs. Oliphant.
To make one loaf:-Rye meal unsifted, half a pint; Indian meal sifted, one pint; sour milk, one pint; molasses, half a gill. Add a teaspoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little hot water; stir well, put in a greaesd pan, let it rise one hour, and steam four hours.
A steamed rye-and-corn loaf with no wheat flour and no yeast, leavened by soda reacting with sour milk. The measurements are all by volume and translate cleanly.
- The hinge: steam, never bakeThis batter has no wheat gluten and no oven-spring; the four hours of moist heat are what set it. Put the greased pan or mold in a covered pot on a rack, with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, and top up the water as it boils away. If the pot runs dry the loaf scorches and stops cooking.
- Volumes convertedHalf a pint of rye meal is 1 cup; a pint of sifted Indian meal is 2 cups; a pint of sour milk is 2 cups. Half a gill is 1/4 cup of molasses. The result is a thick, pourable batter rather than a dough.
- Indian mealCornmeal. "Sifted" here means the coarse bran and hominy fragments were shaken out, so use a fine or medium yellow or white cornmeal, not stone-ground grits.
- Rye meal unsiftedWhole rye meal, coarser than modern light or medium rye flour. Dark rye flour or pumpernickel meal is the nearest supermarket equivalent.
- Sour milkIn the period this meant raw milk soured naturally at room temperature. Pasteurized milk left out spoils rather than souring cleanly. Use cultured buttermilk, which supplies the acid the soda needs.
- SodaBaking soda, dissolved in a little hot water as directed so it disperses evenly. One teaspoon to 2 cups of buttermilk is about right; more leaves a soapy taste in a loaf this dense.
- The hour of "rising"There is no yeast, so nothing ferments. The rest simply lets the meals hydrate and swell, which matters with coarse rye and corn. Do not extend it much past an hour or the soda will have spent itself before the loaf reaches the steam.
- Pan and donenessA pudding mold, coffee tin or straight-sided can of at least 1 1/2 quarts, greased and loosely covered with foil so the loaf has room to expand, works better than an open pan. It is done when a skewer comes out clean; a slight stickiness at the center is normal for brown bread.
- YieldOne loaf, about 8 to 10 slices. Best cut thick while warm, with butter, and it slices more cleanly the next day.
Boston brown bread belongs to a New England tradition of breads built from what the region actually grew: rye and maize, with wheat flour scarce and expensive well into the nineteenth century. A loaf of rye and corn alone went by the older name "rye and Injun"; "thirds bread" is a related name for a loaf that also took a share of wheat flour. Molasses -- cheap in a port city trading with the Caribbean -- supplied both sweetness and color. Steaming rather than baking suited a household that kept a kettle on the fire all day but might not fire a brick oven except once a week, and the loaf became the standing partner to Saturday-night baked beans. That The Home Cook Book, compiled from Chicago contributors in the 1870s, prints it under a named subscriber's recipe shows how far the dish had traveled from Massachusetts by then.