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Steamed Brown Bread

A steamed bread made from cornmeal, milk, molasses, wheat flour, sour milk, baking soda, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Steamed Brown Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Stir cornmeal into boiling milk until well combined.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Add molasses, wheat flour, sour milk, baking soda, and coarse sea salt; stir well.

Steam

  1. Pour the batter into a greased steaming dish.

  2. Steam for 3 hours.

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. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

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

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Molasses + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Milk + molassestop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

Milk and flour 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

Cornmeal
Forms the bulk and sets the crumb as the batter cooks.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, deep colour and moisture to the bread.
Wheat flour
Adds some gluten structure to hold the bread together.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to help the bread rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk and molasses to produce gas for lift.

The step that matters

Stir the baking soda into the sour milk batter. Baking soda needs an acid to react and release gas. Mixing it evenly with the sour milk and molasses lets the bread rise uniformly instead of leaving dense or patchy pockets.

“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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