New England steamed loaf of rye flour, cornmeal, and whole wheat sweetened with molasses, turned out of a can and sliced into rounds
Origin: Boston & New England, USA
From the journey of Rye.
Boston brown bread is steamed, not baked. Rye flour, cornmeal, and whole wheat flour, in roughly equal thirds, are mixed with buttermilk, molasses, and baking soda, poured into a greased can, sealed, and steamed in a pot of simmering water for two hours or more. It comes out dark, moist, sweet, and round, and it is sliced into discs, often with a length of string. In Boston it was traditionally eaten warm on Saturday night with baked beans, and the pair became so fixed that the bread is still sold in cans in New England grocery stores. The recipe is a record of what grew in the colony. The English settlers of Massachusetts Bay brought wheat and rye, and wheat did poorly: the disease the colonists called the blast, a stem rust, devastated New England wheat in the 1660s. Rye grew reliably, and so did the maize the settlers had learned to cultivate from their Indigenous neighbours, so the everyday bread of colonial New England was made from the two together and was known as rye 'n' Injun, from 'Indian' corn. When wheat was added as a third flour it was called thirded bread. Boston brown bread is that loaf's direct descendant. Two changes turned the colonial loaf into the modern one. The first was chemical leavening: American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, printed at Hartford in 1796 as the first cookbook written by an American, uses pearlash, a refined potash, to raise doughs, and baking soda eventually took its place. The second was the stove. Brown bread had been baked in the brick bread oven, and as households moved to iron ranges it was steamed on the stovetop in tins and pudding moulds instead, which is how it acquired its shape and its moist, close crumb. The molasses belongs to the same history. New England was the northern corner of the Atlantic molasses trade, importing Caribbean molasses on a vast scale to distil into rum, and molasses was the cheap everyday sweetener of the region's kitchens.
Boston brown bread is served warm with butter or cream cheese, and on Saturday night with Boston baked beans. Leftover slices are good fried in butter for breakfast. The raisins are traditional in many old recipes but not all, and the bread is equally correct without them. Wrapped well, it keeps for four or five days and reheats by steaming for 10 minutes or wrapping in foil in a warm oven.
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