Brown bread flexible to your tastes, pantry

Brown bread, baked beans, coleslaw and codfish cakes made supper for us last weekend, a real Yankee meal. I asked for a brown bread recipe here last week but, alas, I guess no one makes it anymore because no one sent in a recipe. (That is a challenge.) So I dug around in a couple of old Maine cookbooks I own, and moaned aloud at the library about how I didn’t get any brown bread recipes. My friend Myra Rolerson said, “How about Linda’s recipe? Hers is the best,” referring to our librarian Linda Graf. Linda retrieved her family’s Boston brown bread recipe that had been incorporated into a cookbook based on the annual recipe exchange at Christmas and gave me a copy.

Well, it was interesting to compare these two, because Linda’s incorporated nuts and raisins, uses buttermilk and was a tad sweeter than the other one I dug out, which came from Calais, was dated 1922 and was published by the Knight Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church. Mrs. W.E. Gibson submitted the recipe, one of two or three.

Here is the story on brown bread. There are a couple versions that appeared in the mid-1800s. One was a straight one-third cornmeal, one-third wheat flour and one-third rye meal. That version is a direct descendant of a very old-fashioned yeast bread made with those grains in equal quantities. Other brown breads use graham, whole-wheat flour, cornmeal or sometimes white flour, as well. All of the steamed versions are sweetened with molasses, and some are so sweet they are more like cake than bread.

Linda’s recipe calls for buttermilk, and most use sour milk or buttermilk. Sometimes I have buttermilk on hand but more often not. It is easy to dump some vinegar into regular milk to sour it up so it reacts with the baking soda for leaven.

I have always regarded raisins as an option.

Linda makes her brown bread in coffee cans, I use everything from a tube mold to a pudding dish. I even have an old lard pail I use sometimes. Mrs. Gibson’s recipe says to steam the bread for three hours, but I divided her recipe into two containers that took about an hour and a quarter to steam until done. I steam mine on the wood cookstove because it is hot anyway, as does Linda, who often makes more than she needs right away and freezes a couple loaves for later when she isn’t heating her house with wood.

I was in the mood for a less-sweet brown bread, so the one I tried was Mrs. Gibson’s from Calais. I find brown bread recipes are pretty flexible and can stand more molasses if you like the sweetness, or you can substitute sour milk for buttermilk or vice versa. Add raisins if you like them and toss in a handful of chopped nuts if you want. Maybe down the road I will offer Linda’s recipe here as a nice alternative.

Looking for: A nice salmon loaf.

Send queries or answers to Sandy Oliver, 1061 Main Road, Islesboro 04848. E-mail: tastebuds@prexar.com. For recipes, tell us where they came from. List ingredients, specify number of servings and do not abbreviate measurements. Include name, address and daytime phone number.

Steamed Brown Bread

1 cup graham meal or whole wheat flour

1 cup corn meal

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 cups sour milk

1/2 cup molasses

Place a pot of water on the stove to boil and grease your molds or coffee cans. Put dry ingredients into a bowl and whisk them together well. Stir in milk and molasses, but stir only enough to moisten all the flours. Pour batter into molds or cans, dividing evenly if you use two, and position them on a rack inside the kettle of hot water. Make sure water comes halfway up on the molds. Check occasionally to make sure you have enough water, and add more hot from a kettle as needed. Steam for an hour and a quarter if you divide the batter, for three hours if you do not. To test, insert a skewer as you do for cake; if the skewer comes out clean it is done.

Yields two small loaves, and will serve a dozen people.