Fannie Farmer’s Boston brown bread

Fannie Farmer’s Boston brown bread , which is really a New England variation of the classic British steamed pudding, from the first edition of her Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is typical of her straightforward style and none the worse for that.

• 1cup cornmeal
• 1 cup rye flour
• 1cup whole wheat flour
• 1 Tablespoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups buttermilk
• ¾ cup molasses
• butter for greasing a pudding basin or mold or used 1 lb coffee can

1. Mix and then sift the dry ingredients to aerate them.
2. Stir the milk and molasses into the mix to marry all the ingredients.
3. Grease your receptacle of choice and pour on the batter; do not fill the receptacle to the top because the batter will rise as it cooks. It should fill about two thirds of the chosen vessel.
4. Cover your receptacle with pleated and buttered foil or a buttered dishcloth (teatowel to British readers). If using foil crimp it tight to the receptacle; if cloth, tie it with string.
5. Set the brown bread on a trivet in a pot of water that rises halfway up the receptacle and steam the pudding for about 3½ hours.

Notes:

-We are partial to flinty white Rhode Island cornmeal from Kenyon’s in Usquepaug. Bostonians of Framer’s time would have chosen yellow cornmeal.

-Farmer uses less, ¾ Tablespoon, baking soda but the pudding will remain dense even with our added dose.

-She also specifies “sour milk” or a ratio of 1¾  cups milk or water. The buttermilk is better.

-Yes, a used coffee can; that in fact is the traditional vessel of choice in New England kitchens.

-Mary Lincoln, Miss Farmer’s mentor, includes two recipes for steamed brown bread (and a baked variant for good measure) n her earlier Boston Cook Book . The steamed recipes do not differ much from each other or the Farmer one.

-A century later Jasper White’s recipe is much the same except that he adds ½ cup dried currants or raisins, another traditional touch. He does, however, steam his pudding in the oven instead of atop the stove, and while his recipe refers to a “preheated oven” he provides no temperature.

-White also ascribes the technique of steaming a pudding exclusively to the Native Americans encountered by New England settlers for the first time during the seventeenth century. Before then however then the process was remarked upon by foreign travelers as a uniquely English technique so the settlers themselves had brought it with them to North America.

-White is right about one thing:

“The most famous of our region’s brads, this wholesome blend of wheat, rye and corn flours is as suitable for our diets today as it was 300 years ago.”

The quotation is appears at page 270 of Jasper White’s Cooking from New England (New York 1989)

-White refers explicitly to the coffee can.