Brown bread is delicious. I grew up having it on the occasional
hot dogs, Boston baked beans, and brown bread for supper routine. In my own regard, this is simply one of the best meals known to man - and by man I mean
this man, me.
When in college I was reminiscing about these dinners and found that many of my friends were confused. Most of them had no idea what brown bread was:
* "Oh, you mean pumpernickel, yeah that's stuff's alright."
* "Bread in a can? Is that like cranberry jelly in a can?"
* "You must be mistaken, where I come from bread comes in loaves, not cans."
My good friend Ryan (from Kingston, MA) looked surprisingly at me when I mentioned it and said "Brown bread? That stuff from a can? Oh yeah, we call that hobo-bread." He at least knew what I was talking about. Even more disappointingly, when I finally bought some at the Shaws in downtown Boston to take back to the dorms and wow all my friends it was an utter failure. Nobody was taken by the delicious flavors of toasted, buttered brown bread.
Fools! I thought while eating the rest of the can by myself.
Fast forward 3 years or so.Bea and I are living in Sheridan, WY (voted best in the West for 2006). Out of the blue I get a craving for brown bread. For about a month I searched the four major grocery stores for brown bread: Walmart Supercenter, Albertsons, Safeway, and the IGA. I was unable to find it at any of them.
The IGA was very small and I didn't expect to find it there to begin with. I didn't bother asking because I knew I had searched thoroughly and their inventory was small.
I searched high and low at Safeway and after asking Skip (who the assistant manager who the ladies I worked with thought was a real catch) I realized that I was in real trouble because he had never heard of it before.
I checked the Walmart Supercenter but had no luck. There's nobody there that really knows anything, so if you can't find it yourself in the grocery department most of the time you're out of luck. I asked several people stocking grocery shelves but mostly they thought I was crazy - after all, why would anyone buy bread in a can?
Albertsons - our grocery store of choice. It was here that I made contact . . . eventually. After several cashiers' obligatory "Did you find everything alright?" questioning at checkout time I replied "No, I have been looking for brown bread, do you carry it here?" or something like that. Mostly they responded, "Uhmm, did you check the bakery?" After explaining to them "No, it's bread that comes in a can, you know, when you go to scan it you expect it to be kind of heavy, like a can of beans, but then when you pick it up it's a lot lighter than you expected, you know, bread in a can? Weird bread in can?" But no, they still didn't know what I meant. Finally I found a cheery manager that I explained the situation to, she didn't really know but she said to find her the following week when we came back for groceries, and I did. When I tracked her down, she lead me to the canned food isle and moved some other canned food items out of the way on the very top shelf and revealed two dusty cans of brown bread! Huzzah!
She admitted that she'd never really heard of it before, never tried it before, and certainly had never seen anybody buy it before. Although I was overjoyed that I found some, it was still disappointing on account of the fact that I contained raisins. I don't care for raisins really, so in the end I didn't buy the bread.
Fast forward another year and half or so.I am making my own good ol' fashioned New England Brown bread as we speak (type)! Homemade! Bea's grandmother gave us a bread baking cookbook this year for Christmas with a recipe for New England Brown Bread! Hurrah!
my abbreviated recipe goes a little something like this:
New England Brown Bread1 c. cut up dried up old bread (formerly a baguette from Hannafords)
2 c. buttermilk (substituted with apple cider vinegar and milk)
1 c. corn meal
1 c. rye flour
1 c. whole wheat flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 c. molasses
butter
Soak the bread in the buttermilk for a couple hours. In a separate bowl, sift the corn meal, rye flour, whole wheat flour, baking soda, and salt. Mix in the sifted flour mixture into the bread and buttermilk mixture. Mix in the molasses.
Butter a couple leftover cans (from canned tomatoes or corn or something), and fill them two-thirds full of the brown bread mixture.
Fashion some sort of metal tray in the bottom of a large boiling pot to keep your cans from maintaining direct contact with the bottom of the pot. I used a couple different smush plates from my food mill. Fill the pot with enough water to go about half way up your cans of bread business and heat until boiling before adding the cans of dough. Once the water is boiling add the cans, cover, and reduce heat while retaining a lot of steaming action, and continue for two hours.
Right now I'm about an hour into the steaming process and they look like this:
The little can tipped over at some point so it'll probably end up being quite soggy, but hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em? What?
So, in another hour or so I will take them out (11:30pm) and let them sit overnight and hopefully will be able to toast and butter them for breakfast! I am excited to see how they turn out, and you should be too! SO DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL!
