Bread: Brown Bread

Gervase Markham in The English Housewife (1615) wrote of the baking of brown bread that was suitable only for hind servants. The bread of status in England was white, wheaten bread and not that of other grains. When English settlers came to America in the early seventeenth century, the grains that they relied upon were corn and rye, with a rye and Indian bread (brown bread) emerging that was begrudgingly accepted. By the early nineteenth century, after the Erie Canal opened (1825) and wheat was more available for bread, the former brown bread was looked upon with nostalgia and favored by those who followed the health reform movement of Sylvester Graham in the 1830s. There were two forms of brown bread by the mid-nineteenth century. One was an oven-baked whole wheat bread that included the more highly desired bran, and the other was the more traditional New England-style Boston brown bread.