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Cornmeal Boston Brown Bread

A steamed and baked bread made with cornmeal, rye flour, potatoes, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and rye match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,320 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cornmeal Boston Brown Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Sift together flour, cornmeal, rye flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Rub the potatoes through a sieve and dilute with water.

  3. When cool, mix the potato water with the dry ingredients to form a batter.

Steam and bake

  1. Pour the batter into well-greased molds with covers.

  2. Place the molds in a kettle half full of boiling water.

  3. Steam for one hour, then remove the cover and bake for half an 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. Flour + ryetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Rye + potatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rye + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together535 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Gives the bread its coarse, hearty body and characteristic dark texture.
Rye flour
Adds flavour and some structure, while wheat flour supplies most of the gluten.
Flour
Provides gluten and structure to hold the batter together while it steams.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the batter so it rises during steaming.
Potatoes
Their starch and moisture keep the loaf tender and moist.

The step that matters

Steam for one hour before uncovering. Keeping the molds covered traps steam so the batter cooks through and rises evenly. Removing the cover too early lets the surface dry and can cause the loaf to sink or crack.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, rye, sugar):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, rye, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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