Boston Brown Bread

The cooking time for this is long, but it's a great rich and moist bread for winter. Slice and serve warm with butter.

If you don't have two 1-pound coffee cans available, you can use three 1-pound vegetable cans, but the recipe will only fill 2-1/2 of those. The coffee cans might take up to 5 hours to cook; the smaller vegetable cans 4 hours. (Cooking time can vary greatly!) If a loaf is fully cooked but soggy around the edges, you can dry it in a 400 degree oven for 10 minutes, purely to get a prettier effect. The rasins are optional; if you'd rather, you can also use nuts, coconut, or any chopped dry fruit --- but don't use fresh fruit, because that will just dissolve with the steam. If you don't have buttermilk, substitute 2 cups whole milk plus two tablespoons cider vinegar.

You can also cook this in a deep-enough crockpot; set the temperature to 'high', but be sure to watch that the steambath doesn't run dry.

1 cup corn meal
1 cup rye flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup dark molasses
2 cups buttermilk
1 cup raisins

Mix together all dry ingredients. Mix together buttermilk and molasses; add to dry ingredients. Stir until just blended. Add raisins.
Spoon the batter into two greased 1-pound coffee cans; cover the cans snugly with tinfoil.
Place the cans into a deep pot. Pour water into the pot until it comes halfway up the outside of the cans, cover and simmer on top of the stove.
After at least three hours, test the bread by removing the foil and inserting a knife all the way through the middle. When the knife comes out clean, the bread is done. (It's better to err on the side of extra time rather than short, and a few extra minutes can't hurt it.)
Let rest 10 minutes after removal from the steam bath. Unmold by running a knife around the the inside of the can, then turn the can upside down. If the bread still won't move, use a can opener to open the other end and use the lid to push it out.