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Bread

Boston Brown Bread

A steamed bread made from corn, rye, wheat, and graham flour with molasses, milk, baking soda, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Rye and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boston Brown Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a large bowl, combine the corn meal, rye meal, wheat flour, and graham flour.

  2. Add the milk and mix to form a smooth dough.

Mix and steam

  1. In a separate bowl, stir the baking soda into the molasses until foamy.

  2. Add the foamy molasses to the dough and mix quickly and lightly.

  3. Stir in the coarse sea salt.

  4. Fill a mold with the mixture and steam for 4 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. Rye + wheattop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Corn + wheattop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 coarse, crumbly texture of the bread.
Rye meal
Adds flavour and a dense, moist crumb to the loaf.
Wheat flour
Supplies gluten-forming protein that gives the dough some structure.
Graham flour
Adds nutty flavour and coarse bran texture to the crumb.
New orleans molasses
Gives sweetness, dark colour and moisture, and reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses to produce gas, lightening the dense batter.

The step that matters

Mix the foamy molasses into the dough quickly and lightly. Once baking soda meets the acidic molasses, it starts releasing gas. Overmixing knocks that gas out and develops gluten, leaving a heavy, tight loaf instead of a light, moist one.

“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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