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Brown Bread (One quart of sour milk)
One quart of sour milk, one-half cup of molasses, onehalf cup of sugar, two eggs, three tablespoonfuls of melted butter, one teaspoonful of soda. Mix with brown flour as stiff as you can; stir it with a spoon.
To make gems or puffs for breakfast, use a little less flour and bake in muffin rings or gem pans.
A soda-raised quick bread with no oven temperature, no baking time and no flour quantity — all of which the original cook was expected to know. The critical point is that the leavening is a one-shot acid-base reaction, so the batter goes into a hot oven immediately after mixing.
- Work fast once the soda is inThe soda reacts with the sour milk and molasses the moment they meet, and the gas begins escaping at once. Have pans greased and the oven up to temperature before you stir, and bake without delay.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered raw milk, which no longer exists in a supermarket. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute, quart for quart; milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup also works but is thinner and less tangy.
- Brown flourPeriod shorthand for whole wheat or graham flour — coarsely milled, bran included. Modern whole wheat flour is close enough.
- How much flour"As stiff as you can" and stirred with a spoon means a thick drop batter, not a kneadable dough. With a quart of buttermilk the quantity will be substantial. Add it gradually and stop when the spoon stands up briefly on its own.
- The soda is scantOne teaspoon for a quart of sour milk plus half a cup of molasses is on the light side by modern practice; a teaspoon and a half to two teaspoons gives a better rise. Sift or whisk it through the flour rather than dropping it into the liquid, or you will get dark bitter streaks.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither. For loaves, 350F for 50 to 65 minutes in two greased loaf pans, until a skewer comes out clean. For the gems, 400F for 20 to 25 minutes.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans were greased and heated empty before the batter went in, which sets the crust immediately. A cast-iron muffin pan preheated in the oven reproduces this; an ordinary muffin tin works but gives a softer edge.
- YieldThe full quart of milk makes a large amount — enough for two loaves, or a comparable quantity of gems. Halve it comfortably if you want one loaf.
Brown bread in nineteenth-century American kitchens covered two quite different things: the steamed, molasses-dark loaf of New England, boiled for hours in a covered mould, and quicker oven-baked versions like this one, raised with soda and sour milk instead of yeast or steam. Both depended on molasses, which was cheap, and on coarse wheat or rye meal, which was cheaper than bolted white flour. That this recipe begins with a whole quart of sour milk says something about the households it was written for: milk soured on its own schedule, in quantity, and a good cook had standing uses for it rather than throwing it out. The note about gems is characteristic of the period too — gem pans, heavy cast-iron trays of shallow cups, were a common fixture of American kitchens in the later nineteenth century, and cookbook writers commonly offered the same batter as a loaf for dinner or as small hot breads for breakfast.