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Splendid Brown Bread
One quart sour milk, half cup of molasses, one cup lard, one tablespoon even of soda, one tablespoon s Graham flour enough to make a stiff batter; put it in two quart tin pail and cover with the lid ; suspend pail by a stick through the handle in a pot of boil water and keep boiling three hours, take it off and after removing the lid bake in the same pail in a slow oven.
A steamed brown bread of the New England type, cooked in a lidded pail suspended in boiling water and then dried out in the oven. The text has been garbled in a couple of places, so read the notes before you start.
- The garbled line"One tablespoon s" is almost certainly one tablespoon of salt, and "one tablespoon" of Graham flour makes no sense next to "enough to make a stiff batter." Read it as: soda, salt, and Graham flour enough to make a stiff batter.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which no longer exists in the supermarket. Cultured buttermilk is the standard substitute, one quart, and it carries enough acid to work with the soda.
- A tablespoon of soda is a lotSaleratus and soda of the period were generally weaker per spoonful than modern bicarbonate. A full tablespoon against a quart of buttermilk risks a soapy, faintly metallic taste today; around two teaspoons is a safer modern measure.
- One cup of lardThat is a very rich brown bread by modern standards. Lard is still sold and behaves as intended here; butter or a neutral oil can be substituted, though butter carries water and will not behave quite identically.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour with the bran left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; the recipe gives no quantity, so add flour until the batter is stiff enough to hold a spoon upright.
- The pail and the steamingA two-quart tin pail should be filled no more than two-thirds so the loaf has room to rise. Any lidded, straight-sided tin or a heatproof pudding basin covered with foil and tied works; set it on a rack in a stockpot with boiling water halfway up the side, and top up with more boiling water as it goes.
- Three hours means three hoursSteaming is what cooks this loaf. Keep the water at a genuine boil the whole time and do not lift the lid to check before about two and a half hours, or the loaf may sink.
- A slow ovenRoughly 275 to 325F. Twenty to thirty minutes uncovered is enough to dry the crust; the bread is already cooked through and longer will only harden it.
- Yield and servingOne large loaf, about eight to ten thick slices. Traditionally cut with a string rather than a knife, served warm with butter, and reheated by steaming rather than toasting.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a family of American puddings and breads cooked over water rather than in an oven, a habit that outlived the open hearth by decades because it needed no reliable oven at all. The Graham flour here points to the mid-century health reform movement associated with Sylvester Graham, whose advocacy of coarse unbolted wheat had filtered into ordinary domestic cookery without much of its original moralising attached. Suspending the pail by a stick through its handle keeps the tin off the bottom of the pot so the loaf steams instead of scorching, an improvised solution of the same order as the pudding cloth. The final turn in the oven is the housekeeper's refinement: three hours of steam leaves the crust damp, and a slow oven dries it to something that will slice.</p>