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Bread

Steamed Brown Bread

A steamed loaf made from wheaten meal, buttermilk, and leavening agents.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and buttermilk work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 674 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Steamed Brown Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the wheaten meal, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add buttermilk to form a nice dough.

  3. Transfer the dough into a cake tin.

Steam

  1. Steam the cake for 2 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. Cream + buttermilktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Wheaten meal
Provides the main structure and body of the bread.
Buttermilk
Adds moisture and acidity that binds the dough together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the buttermilk to produce gas that lightens the bread.
Cream of tartar
Acts as an acid that works with the baking soda to help the bread rise.

The step that matters

Gradually add buttermilk to form a nice dough. Wheaten meal absorbs liquid at different rates, so adding buttermilk slowly lets you reach a dough that is moist but not sticky. Too much liquid at once makes a heavy, dense loaf.

“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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