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Indian Bread
Mrs. A. T. Hall.
One pint of meal, one pint of flour, one pint of milk, one teacup of molasses, one teaspoon of soda, one-half of cream tartar; steam two hours and bake half an hour.
A steamed New England-style brown bread, leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than yeast. The two-hour steam does the cooking; the half hour in the oven only dries and firms the crust.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal, so called because maize was "Indian corn." A medium or fine yellow meal gives the texture intended; stone-ground coarse meal will stay gritty even after two hours of steam.
- The teacupA nineteenth-century teacup is smaller than a modern mug and was never standardised; reckon it at somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup (roughly 4 to 6 fl oz) of molasses. Use unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether these are homemade baking powder, and the molasses supplies extra acid. Mix them into the dry ingredients and get the batter into the mold promptly; the rise begins the moment the milk goes in.
- No salt is givenPossibly an oversight, though period recipes of this type often omit it. A teaspoon of salt in the dry mix keeps the loaf from tasting flat and sweet.
- The vesselA one- to two-quart pudding mold, coffee tin, or straight-sided ovenproof bowl, well greased and filled no more than two-thirds. Cover tightly with foil or a lid so condensation does not fall onto the loaf.
- SteamingStand the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full two hours. Top up with boiling water as it drops — running the pot dry will scorch the base of the bread.
- The bakeThe recipe gives no oven heat at all. Uncover the mold and give it 30 minutes in a moderate oven, around 350F. This is not to cook the bread through but to dry the surface; a skewer should come out clean before it goes in.
- Yield and servingOne loaf of roughly 8 to 10 slices. Cut it warm with a length of thread or a serrated knife rather than pressing down with a blade, and serve with butter or baked beans.
Steamed Indian bread belongs to the New England tradition of cooking batters in a covered mold set in water, a technique inherited from English boiled and cloth-tied puddings and kept alive in American kitchens where oven heat was expensive and unreliable. Cornmeal and molasses were the cheap staples behind it: meal from local mills, molasses arriving through the West Indies trade, and the pair combined in everything from hasty pudding to the wheat-and-rye-and-Indian loaves that gave rise to Boston brown bread. This version, contributed under a subscriber's name, is typical of The Home Cook Book (Chicago, first published 1874), which was assembled from the recipes of local housewives and sold to benefit a charitable home — a format that spread through American cities in the decades after the Civil War. The reliance on soda and cream of tartar rather than yeast was written for a cook who wanted bread on the table the same day.