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Brown Bread (Two even cupfuls of graham)
Two even cupfuls of graham flour, one even cupful of cornmeal, two and one-third cupfuls sweet milk, two-thirds of a cupful of molasses, one teaspoonful soda dissolved in boiling water; stir into molasses until it foams; salt. Steam three hours.
A steamed brown bread of the Boston type, leavened only by soda reacting with molasses. The batter is thin and the steaming is long, so the two things to get right are the vessel and the water level.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour, ground from the entire kernel. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest substitute; ordinary whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer, less nubbly crumb.
- Sweet milk"Sweet" means fresh rather than soured or buttermilk. Use whole milk; the recipe has no fat other than what the milk provides.
- The soda and molassesThis is the hinge. Dissolve the teaspoon of soda in a tablespoon or two of boiling water and stir it into the molasses off the heat, then combine at once with the wet and dry ingredients and get the pan into the steam. The foaming reaction is the only lift the loaf gets and it will not wait.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will overwhelm the cornmeal. Light molasses gives a paler, milder loaf.
- CornmealPeriod recipes mean yellow or white field corn ground medium-fine, sold then as Indian meal. Avoid degerminated fine cornmeal if you want the slightly gritty texture the loaf is meant to have.
- VesselFill greased pudding molds or coffee cans no more than two-thirds full and cover the top with greased foil or a cloth tied down, so condensation does not soak the loaf. The batter comes to roughly six cups, which fills about two 1-lb coffee cans.
- SteamingSet the covered molds on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up their sides, keep it at a bare simmer and covered, and top up with boiling water as it falls. Three hours is correct for a full-sized mold; smaller cans are done in about 1 1/2 to 2 hours, when a skewer comes out clean.
- Finishing and yieldIf you like, uncover and dry the loaves briefly in a moderate oven so the crust firms, then turn out; the recipe itself calls for no oven. Two moderate loaves, about 12 to 16 slices; serve warm with butter, or with baked beans, the customary New England pairing.
Steamed brown bread belongs to the New England kitchen, where a batter of rye or wheat meal and cornmeal, sweetened with molasses and raised with soda, was steamed rather than baked because, it is generally said, it could sit over the fire alongside the Saturday bean pot without heating a separate oven. The older name for the type is thirded bread or rye-and-Indian, from the mix of meals; this version drops the rye and leans on graham flour, the coarse whole-meal associated with Sylvester Graham's campaign for unrefined bread in the 1830s and 1840s, which in time became an ordinary grocery item rather than a reform diet. Molasses did the sweetening because it was cheap and abundant in the northeastern trade, and it also supplies the acid that the soda needs, which is why so many of these recipes insist you watch the mixture foam. Its presence in a general cook book, among the breads, shows how long the chemically leavened steamed loaf held its place after the cookstove had made baking easy.