Brown Bread, or Rye and Indian

I love the taste combination of cornmeal and molasses. I can't get enough of it, which is why I love Indian pudding and Anadama bread. It's also why I love Boston brown bread.

Some people leave off the "Boston" and just call it brown bread, but no matter what you call it this loaf is quintessentially New England. These days it's usually served with baked beans or during clambakes, but for centuries it was a common everyday bread.

Brown bread has an interesting history. When the Puritans first settled in this area their preferred grain for baking was wheat, but they soon learned that corn (maize) grew much better in the New England soil. According to historians, the average farm produced 100 bushels of corn to 18 bushels of wheat. This ratio only got worse after a wheat fungus evocatively called "the blast" arrived. Ultimately, New Englanders needed to import wheat from other parts of the country, which made it quite expensive.

My brown bread is indeed very brown!

Although wheat didn't grow well here, a less popular European grain did - rye. Along with cornmeal, rye flour became the main ingredient for the bread baked by common people, and also gave it it's name, Rye and Indian. This name later became condensed to one word, Ryaninjun. The term Indian here refers to Indian corn, or maize.

The Puritans made Ryaninjun by mixing the two flours with some leavening and liquid, and forming them into dome shaped loaves (similar to modern soda bread). Ryaninjun loaves were baked on oak leaves or cabbage leaves, which imparted an interesting flavor. In the autumn small children were sent out to gather oak leaves specifically for baking bread.

In the 1820s, Ryaninjun also began to be called brown bread, and the two terms became interchangeable. At this time recipes began to include molasses, and called for steaming the bread in cylindrical molds rather than baking.

In the earliest twenty-first century the name Ryaninjun has disappeared, but many recipes still call for steaming the bread, often in coffee cans. I baked mine in a loaf pan, using a recipe I found in a Mark Bittman cookbook. The recipe didn't call for lining the pan with oak leaves, but I think I'll try that in the fall!

I got this information from Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's wonderful book America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking.

Full Corn Moon - with Music

Next week's full moon is the Full Corn Moon, according to the Old Farmer's Almanac. I tend to think of fresh local corn as a summer thing, but the corn season is at it's height now. Some years if we're lucky we can buy local corn until Halloween.

Corn, or maize, is of course native to the Americas, and was probably first grown in New England around 1,000 A.D. It became more integral to the Algonquian's diet in the following centuries, particularly in southern New England where the weather was milder. (This info is from Kathleen Bragdon's Native People of Southern New England 1500-1650). Maize was believed to have been a gift from the gods.

I have a neighbor who is American Indian, and one summer she was growing corn with red, black and yellow kernels in the neighborhood garden. This is often called Indian corn and is used for wreaths and centerpieces in the fall, but as she pointed out "All corn is Indian corn. The correct term is decorative corn." Point taken!

The English settlers coined the term Indian corn. In Britain, the word "corn" refers to any grain. Wheat, oats, barley, whatever - it's all corn to the British. When they arrived in the New World they called maize Indian corn to differentiate it from all the other things they called corn. Gradually the term for maize just became corn, with Americans calling wheat, barley, oats, etc. grain or cereal.

The Algonquians in New England had some interesting recipes for corn. In addition to roasting, boiling and mashing it, they would:

• According to Roger Williams, "bake bread of Indian corn which they call pagataw; with this and austres (oysters) a kind of snail, they make a dish which is widely used."

• According to Timothy Alden, "pound mature corn fine, sift it, make it into a dough with water or bear oil, cover the dough with leaves or pat it into little inch-thick cakes, and bake it in the ashes."

Bear oil is hard to find these days at the supermarket, but you can still find oysters. The favorite corn dish for the English was Indian pudding, which I discussed earlier this year. (Recipes are from Indian New England Before the Mayflower by Howard Russell.)

Finally, in an effort to take advantage of the Web's multi-media capacities, here is a link to Vanessa Williams singing "Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas, Disney's animated take on colonialism and cultural conflict. It has the lyric: "Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?" The movie may be a little hokey, but at least they didn't tack on a happy ending, and the song is good.