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Boston Brown Bread (One and one-half pints Indian)
One and one-half pints Indian meal, one and one-half pints of rye meal, one cupful of molasses, two tablespoonfuls vinegar, one teaspoonful salt, two even teaspoonfuls saleratus or soda, one quart lukewarm water. Boil or bake five hours.
A plain steamed brown bread of the older sort: no wheat flour, no yeast, and all of its lift from soda meeting molasses and vinegar. The batter should pour, not mound.
- Indian meal and rye mealIndian meal is cornmeal, ideally a stone-ground yellow or white meal rather than a fine degerminated one. Rye meal is coarse whole-grain rye, closer to what is sold as dark or pumpernickel rye flour than to light rye.
- Pints as dry measureA pint here is two cups by volume, so this is 3 cups cornmeal and 3 cups rye meal against a quart (4 cups) of water. By weight that is roughly a pound of cornmeal and something under a pound of rye, depending on the grind.
- SaleratusAn older leavening sold under that name; early saleratus was potassium bicarbonate, though by the later nineteenth century the name often covered sodium bicarbonate, and the recipe itself treats "saleratus or soda" as interchangeable. Two level teaspoons of modern baking soda serves. The vinegar and the acidity of the molasses are what set it off, which is why both appear.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap and not sorghum syrup. Blackstrap is bitter enough to dominate a loaf with no sugar or wheat to soften it.
- "Boil" means steam"Boil" is generally taken here to mean steaming rather than immersing the batter: fill greased covered molds or coffee tins two-thirds full, cover tightly with foil or a lid, set them on a rack in a deep pot with water halfway up their sides, and keep the water at a bare simmer, topping it up as it goes.
- If baking insteadThe recipe gives no oven heat; a slow oven, in the region of 300F, with a deep covered mold set in a pan of hot water, is a reasonable modern equivalent. The cover matters: uncovered, the top of a five-hour loaf dries to a crust before the middle sets.
- The five hours is realCoarse meal with no wheat gluten needs long, moist, gentle heat to gelatinize fully; cut short, the center stays gritty and pasty. A skewer should come out clean and the loaf should feel springy, not slack.
- Yield and servingThe batter runs to something like four pounds, enough for two large molds or several small ones. Steamed brown bread is meant to be turned out hot, sliced thick with a string or a serrated knife, and eaten with butter, or with baked beans and salt pork.
Steamed brown bread belongs to the New England kitchen of the pre-wheat era, when corn grew readily and rye tolerated poor soil, while wheat flour arrived by ship and cost money. Cooks combined the two grains so consistently that "rye and Indian" became a standing phrase for the loaf, and "Indian meal" for maize meal survived in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century. Steaming rather than baking suited a household that had a kettle on the fire all day and no reliable oven, and the pairing with Saturday baked beans is the association most often cited for why the bread persisted after ovens improved. The vinegar and saleratus point to chemical leavening, though they do not date the recipe at all tightly: saleratus was in common American household use from the 1830s, with pearlash earlier still. Earlier versions leaned on a sourdough or yeast sponge and a much longer rise, and the swap to soda presumably shortened the work considerably.