Skip to main content
Main

Steamed Graham Bread

A steamed bread made with graham flour, molasses, sour milk, salt, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Steamed Graham Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Sift salt and baking soda with graham flour and mix thoroughly.

  2. Add molasses and enough sour milk to make a stiff batter. Beat the mixture well.

  3. Fill well-buttered molds or cans no more than two-thirds full.

Steam

  1. Place molds in a kettle of boiling water. Boil for 10 minutes if molds are small and 15 minutes if large.

  2. Remove the kettle to a cooker without jarring and leave for 3 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove bread from molds.

  2. Brush bread with melted butter. Place bread in a hot oven until brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + molassestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Molasses + milktop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Graham flour
Forms the bulk of the batter and gives the bread its structure and nutty, coarse texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in sour milk to produce gas, lightening the batter as it steams.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color and moisture, and contributes to browning.
Sour milk
Supplies moisture and acidity that activates the baking soda and tenderizes the crumb.

The step that matters

Keep the kettle undisturbed while steaming. Jarring the cooker during the long steam can knock air out of the batter before it sets, leaving a dense, heavy loaf. Keeping the kettle still lets the rising structure hold.

“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.

You might also like

Molasses SauceMolasses Sauce32 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes