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Brown Bread (Three cupfuls of cornmeal two)
Three cupfuls of cornmeal, two cupfuls brown flour, one cupful molasses, little salt, one teaspoonful saleratus (or soda), three and one-half cupfuls of warm water. Steam two and one-half hours.
A steamed brown bread of the plainest sort: no eggs, no dairy, no leavening beyond soda reacting with molasses. The batter is thin, and it must be steamed rather than baked.
- SaleratusSaleratus is the leavening the recipe itself glosses as "soda": originally potassium bicarbonate, by the later nineteenth century generally sodium bicarbonate, i.e. baking soda. Use a level teaspoon. Its only acid partner here is the molasses, so a fairly dark molasses will do more for it than a mild one.
- Brown flourUsually taken to mean unbolted wheat, i.e. whole wheat or graham flour. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is the closest modern match; white whole wheat will give a paler, blander loaf.
- CornmealCornmeal in this period was generally stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket meal. A medium or coarse grind gives the expected gritty crumb; fine degerminated meal makes it pasty.
- The batter is meant to be looseThree and a half cups of water to five cups of dry goods produces something closer to thick porridge than dough. Do not tighten it with extra flour — the steam and the cornmeal absorb it over two and a half hours.
- How to steam itFill greased molds or coffee cans about two-thirds full, cover tightly with foil or a lid so condensation cannot drip in, and set them on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops.
- Timing and donenessTwo and a half hours is right for one or two large molds; smaller cans are done in about ninety minutes. A skewer should come out clean and the loaf should pull slightly from the sides.
- Yield and servingSomething on the order of four pounds of batter: two large molds, or three smaller cans. Turn out while hot, then let them dry a few minutes in a warm oven so the surface is not tacky. Slice with a string or a serrated knife, and serve warm with butter or alongside baked beans.
Steamed brown bread is the New England answer to a stove that was busy and an oven that was unreliable: the pot of water regulates the temperature for you, so the loaf cannot scorch. Cornmeal, rye or whole wheat, and molasses are the standing trio of the type being Boston brown bread, or in nineteenth-century books "thirded" bread, from the three meals in roughly equal parts. This one drops the rye and leans harder on the corn. Molasses does double duty here, sweetening and supplying the acid that sets off the soda; saleratus, the older name printed alongside "soda" in period books, began as potassium bicarbonate and only later came to be used for sodium bicarbonate. The recipe is barely two sentences long.