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Boston Brown Bread

A steamed bread made with cornmeal, graham or rye flour, molasses, sour milk, salt, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and rye work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 182 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Boston Brown Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine corn meal, graham or rye flour, molasses, sour milk, salt, and dissolved baking soda.

  2. Beat the mixture well until smooth.

Steam

  1. Pour the batter into a mold and steam for three hours.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Corn + ryetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together182 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Rye + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together918 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Rye + molassestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Molasses + milktop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn meal
Provides the bulk and the coarse, crumbly texture of the bread.
Graham or rye flour
Adds gluten-based structure and a nutty, earthy flavor to the loaf.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture, and the dark color typical of this bread.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to produce gas that lightens the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to produce carbon dioxide for rising.

The step that matters

Steam for the full time. Steaming gently sets the batter into a moist loaf without browning. Cutting the time short leaves the center underset and gummy, because the starches and proteins need sustained heat to firm up.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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