Skip to main content
Bread

Boston Brown Bread

Boston Brown Bread is a steamed bread made with bread crumbs, sweet milk, molasses, baking soda, salt, egg, cornmeal, graham flour, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boston Brown Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs and sweet milk.

  2. Stir in molasses, baking soda, salt, and the egg.

  3. Add cornmeal and enough graham flour to achieve a thick batter.

  4. Fold in the raisins.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into three one-pound baking powder cans.

  2. Steam for 2½ to 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Bread crumbs
Provide bulk and a tender, moist crumb structure to the batter.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark colour and a rich, moist flavour.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses acidity to help the bread rise and lighten.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps set the structure as it cooks.
Graham flour
Thickens the batter and gives the bread its hearty, nutty texture.
Raisins
Add pockets of sweetness and chew throughout the bread.

The step that matters

Keep the batter thick before steaming. A batter that is too thin will turn dense and gummy, since the graham flour must absorb enough liquid to hold its structure. Adding flour until the batter is thick gives the bread a firm, sliceable crumb once steamed.

“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.

More boston brown bread recipes

Ice Cream 3 See all 349 →

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesNut BreadNut Bread109 recipesWheat BreadWheat Bread65 recipes