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Bread

Boston Brown Bread

A potato-based bread made with rye, wheat, and cornmeal, baked after boiling in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the batter

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

  2. Wash, peel, and boil the potatoes until tender.

  3. Rub the boiled potatoes through a sieve and thin with nearly 1 pint of water to make the batter.

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

Steam and brown

  1. Set the molds into hot water, filling to within 2 inches of the top, and boil for 2 hours.

  2. Remove the molds from the water, uncover, and place in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 20 minutes to brown on top.

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. Wheat + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Rye + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 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 dark, earthy flavour and a dense, moist crumb.
Wheat flour
Gives the loaf structure so it holds together after steaming.
Cornmeal
Adds bulk and a coarse, tender texture to the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas to lift the batter so the bread is not wholly dense.
Potatoes
Add starch and moisture, keeping the bread soft and moist.

The step that matters

Boiling the molds in water. The molds must stay submerged to the right level for the full two hours. Steam from the water cooks the bread gently and evenly; if the water boils dry or the level drops, the loaf dries out and bakes unevenly.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rye, flour, wheat, 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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