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Bread

Boston Brown Bread

A moist, sweet bread made with molasses, cornmeal, brown flour, sour and sweet milk, baking soda, butter, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boston Brown Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix molasses, cornmeal, brown flour, sour milk, sweet milk, baking soda dissolved in hot water, butter, and salt.

Steam and bake

  1. Steam the mixture for 3 hours.

  2. Bake for 1 hour.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Molasses + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color, and a moist, rich texture to the bread.
Cornmeal
Gives the bread a coarse, grainy texture and structure.
Brown flour
Provides the main structure of the loaf.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to help the bread rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in sour milk to produce gas that leavens the bread.

The step that matters

Steam the mixture for 3 hours. Steaming keeps the bread moist while it sets; the steam must be maintained over the full time, since the leavening reaction happens early and the loaf can turn out dense or gummy if the cooking vessel dries out or the steam is interrupted.

“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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