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Boston Brown Bread (Two cupfuls sour milk one)
Two cupfuls sour milk, one cupful of sweet milk, one cupful of white flour, three cupfuls of corn meal, one teaspoonful of soda, one-half cupful of molasses, one teaspoonful of salt; steam three hours and bake twenty minutes.
A steamed loaf of the old New England type, leavened entirely by soda reacting with sour milk and molasses. The batter is thin — closer to a pancake batter than a dough — and that is correct.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which pasteurized milk will not reliably produce. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup; it supplies the acid the teaspoon of soda needs. "Sweet milk" is simply ordinary unsoured whole milk.
- Corn mealPeriod recipes mean stone-ground meal, coarser and more absorbent than modern degerminated cornmeal. Either yellow or white works; a medium grind gives the closest texture.
- No rye hereThe classic Boston brown bread formula uses rye along with cornmeal and wheat. This version drops it, leaving a more distinctly corn-flavored loaf.
- The vesselSteam it in a covered, well-greased mold or molds filled about two-thirds full — a pudding basin, or several 1-lb cans; this is a large quantity of batter, so allow ample capacity. It must be covered so condensation does not drip in, and the batter needs room to rise.
- How to steamSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover the pot, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full three hours. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; the pot must never go dry.
- The bakeThe twenty minutes in the oven dries the surface and firms the crust. Uncover the mold. The recipe specifies no temperature; a moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is the usual reading.
- TestingA skewer into the center should come out clean and the loaf should have pulled slightly from the sides. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out, or it will tear.
- Yield and servingA large quantity of batter, likely more than a single loaf depending on the molds used. Cut it with a taut string or a serrated knife rather than pressing down with a blade, and serve warm with butter or alongside baked beans.
Steamed brown bread belongs to a New England tradition older than reliable home ovens: a covered mold set over water on the hearth could produce bread without a hot brick oven, and the technique survived long after ovens became common because the result — dense, dark, faintly sweet — was liked for its own sake. Molasses did the sweetening because it was cheap and abundant in a region built on the West Indies trade, and cornmeal (called Indian meal in earlier books) stretched scarce wheat flour. The pairing with Saturday-night baked beans is the association most often cited, and brown bread became a Boston signature, sold in bakeries and later canned commercially. The reliance on sour milk and soda rather than yeast places it in the long nineteenth-century era of chemical leavening, when a cook used up milk that had turned rather than throwing it out.