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Bread

Boston Brown Bread

A steamed bread made with cornmeal, rye meal, wheat flour, molasses, milk, baking soda, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the corn meal, rye meal, whole wheat flour, molasses, and milk.

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in the molasses before adding it to the mixture.

  3. Stir in the baking powder.

Steam

  1. Steam the mixture 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. 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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn meal
Gives the bread its coarse, crumbly texture and yellow body.
Rye meal
Adds a dense texture and a distinctive, earthy flavor.
Whole wheat flour
Provides gluten-forming structure to hold the loaf together.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture, and dark color, and its acidity activates the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses to release gas that lightens the batter.
Baking powder
Releases additional gas during steaming to help the bread rise.

The step that matters

Dissolving the baking soda in the molasses. Baking soda must be fully dispersed before it meets the batter. Dissolving it first spreads it evenly so the gas forms uniformly, avoiding dense spots or bitter pockets of unreacted soda.

“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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