Boston Brown Bread

Boston brown bread, served with cream cheese.
Found on Wikimedia Commons, Author (?) jeffreyw

Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated by recipes.  As a young child, I enjoyed reading cookbooks to get more of them.  Sometimes, I still do.  It's a great way to enjoy more food than you can eat without actually overeating.

Anyway, I was looking on the Internet for baked bean recipes to cook (not just because they make interesting reading) when I spotted a reference to something called "Boston brown bread."  Since I'd never heard of it, I went to Wikipedia to track down some basic information about this tasty-looking item. 

According to Wikipedia, Boston brown bread is a sodium bicarbonate quick bread--like Irish soda bread.  Unlike Irish soda bread, Boston brown bread is made with both whole wheat flour and rye flour, and sweetened with molasses--hence its brown color.  It is considered the traditional accompaniment to baked beans, which is why it was referred to in the baked bean recipe I was reading.  

The Food Timeline has some interesting information about this bread.  It cites Boston brown bread as an explicit example of the phenomenon I referred to in my soda bread post.  First, a simple home-cooked food item is simply food for the poor.  As time goes on, that food acquires an aura of healthiness, because it is so basic.  Eventually, it becomes an item made and sought out by "foodies" for its culinary values other than nutrition (e.g., healthiness, flavor).

Boston brown bread often included corn meal--like rye and whole wheat, another cheap flour that could be exploited by the poor to make their meals more interesting. In fact, the same bread, minus the raisins, was called "Rye and Indian" or "Rye and Injun" bread because rye flour and cornmeal were its main ingredients.  Another variant, "thirded bread", was made with equal parts of rye flour, whole wheat flour, and cornmeal.  All of these were thought of as "make do" breads by the folk who lived on them, and were quickly abandoned by most once white bread became cheap.

Unlike soda bread, which was either baked or pan fried, Boston brown bread was often steamed in a container, such as a coffee can.  The Food Timeline claims that this is because early New England houses didn't have ovens.  Instead, they used a fireplace for cooking, and "[s]teaming was an effective way to make bread without an oven."  It also results in a food that looks a lot like what the British still call a "pudding"--a steamed bread, often with raisins or other sweet additions.

Because it's steamed, Boston brown bread is ideal for the slow cooker--all you need is a suitable container to steam the batter in.  I hope to experiment with some recipes for it later this year.

Irish Soda Bread

Whole wheat soda bread.  Photo taken by Heather "Moria"'
Found on Wikimedia Commons.

My husband has often remarked that certain foods that have become beloved of foodies started out as everyday foods, cheap enough to make for the poorest of families.  

A great example of this phenomenon is Irish soda bread.  If you look on the Internet, you will find great numbers of soda bread recipes.  Some have caraway seeds.  Others don't.  Many have raisins or currants, or added sugar, or butter. There are even a few that can be made in a slow cooker.

If the soda bread of your dreams has any of these extras, it is inauthentic, according to the website of The Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread ("the Society"). This organization, started by Irish immigrant Ed O'Dwyer, attempts to set the record straight about the real Irish soda bread.

The real Irish soda bread, as befits a food affordable even by the poor, had only four ingredients:  baking soda, wheat flour, buttermilk, and salt.  Any other additions turn it into a fancy dish for respected company.  Irish soda bread with raisins or currants and sugar is more like a tea cake, according to Mr. O'Dwyer.

On the other hand, the baking soda is essential; it's what makes this quick bread rise.  When sodium bicarbonate (the chemical name for baking soda) reacts with an acid, it releases carbon dioxide which causes the bread to rise.  Buttermilk, which is acidic, performs this function for Irish soda bread.

The Society's website states that the earliest reference they have found is from the Farmer's Magazine (London), Vol. 5, page 328, November 1836.  The Farmer's Magazine article cited an unnamed correspondent of the Newry Telegraph, a newspaper in County Down, Ireland, as giving the following recipe for it.

He says, "put a pound and a half of good wheaten meal into a large bowl, mix with it two teaspoonfuls of finely-powdered salt, then take a large teaspoonful of super-carbonate of soda, dissolve it in a half a teacupful of cold water, and add it to the meal; rub up all intimately together, then pour into the bowl as much very sour buttermilk as will make the whole into soft dough (it should be as soft as could possibly be handled, and the softer the better,) form it into a cake of about an inch thickness, and put into a flat Dutch oven or frying pan, with some metallic cover, such as an oven-lid or griddle, apply a moderate heat underneath for twenty minutes, then lay some clear live coals upon the lid, and keep it so for half an hour longer (the under heat being allowed to fall off gradually for the last fifteen minutes,) taking off the cover occasionally to see that it does not burn.

The Food Timeline, in turn, points to recipes for soda bread from roughly the same period, including one from 1829 that includes raisins, currants, sugar, sweet almonds, and candied orange peel.  That recipe, however, was clearly intended for a festive occasion, as Mr. O'Dwyer says, since the recipe's source identifies it as "the holiday cake of Munster."

My personal acquaintance with soda bread came from that palace of conspicuous consumption, America's favorite supermarket, Wegmans.  Wegmans' version of soda bread contains raisins and a bit of sugar, and adds barley flour and rye flour as well as palm oil (substitute for butter?) and several milk products, possibly meant to take the place of the buttermilk.  I like this bread so much that I'm grateful that they only sell it around St. Patrick's Day, or I'd eat it to excess far too often.  But now that I know how inauthentic Wegmans version is, I'm tempted to use my slow cooker to try out a more authentic recipe, just to see how well I like it.  Or maybe I should try making it in a skillet, which is is more traditional (as the Newry Telegraph noted).