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Bread

Boston Brown Bread

A dense bread made with rye, cornmeal, wheat flour, molasses, milk, salt, and baking soda.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix the rye flour, cornmeal, wheat flour, Puerto Rican molasses, milk, salt, and baking soda dissolved in a little hot water until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a very tight mold.

Steam and serve

  1. Boil the mold for 4 hours.

  2. Serve hot.

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. Rye + corntop 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

Rye flour
Provides the dense, hearty structure and the characteristic dark crumb.
Cornmeal (in the method)
Adds coarse texture and body to the crumb.
Wheat flour
Adds gluten for some structure, holding the dense batter together.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture and deep color to the bread.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses's acidity to lift and lighten the batter.

The step that matters

Filling the mold tightly. A very tight mold keeps steam from escaping and the batter from rising unevenly. Without a sealed fit, water can seep in during boiling and make the bread soggy.

“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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