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Bread

Boston Brown Bread

A steamed and baked bread made with Graham flour, cornmeal, molasses, sweet milk, baking soda, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

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.

Make the batter

  1. Mix Graham flour, cornmeal, and sweet milk in a bowl.

  2. Stir baking soda into molasses in a separate bowl, then add to the flour mixture.

Steam and brown

  1. Pour batter into a tightly sealed pail.

  2. Steam the pail in a kettle of hot water for 3 hours.

  3. Bake the pail in a 400°F oven for a few minutes to 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
Provides the bulk and hearty, wholesome structure of the bread.
Cornmeal
Adds coarse texture and body to the crumb.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark colour and moisture to the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses acid to lift and lighten the bread.
Sweet milk
Hydrates the flours so the batter forms a moist, pourable mix.

The step that matters

Steaming the sealed pail. The pail must be tightly sealed and kept in gently simmering water for the full steaming time. Steam supplies moist heat that sets the dense batter without drying it, and a leaking seal lets water in and makes 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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