> While brown bread may have contained some molasses in the early 1900s, post-WWII it was usually made without. So Canadian brown bread is, unlike Boston-style bread, not sweet (see the 1909 quotation) and also distinct from Irish brown bread, though the latter may have inspired it.
Brown bread is sweet, and you are supposed to cut it up into little hockey pucks and toast it. It is the perfect shape when it comes out of the can.
Lived in BC, SK, and ON. I'm far enough east that I regularly hit up both Ottawa and Montreal.
In my experience "brown bread" is a synonym for whole wheat bread. If you go order a sandwich and they ask what bread you want it on and you say "brown", you're getting whole wheat (or maybe 60% whole wheat... just not white).
I'd be very confused if I ever got this molasses-sweetened bread everyone is talking about.
I would note that's a recipe on a molasses website. My family recipe uses one quarter cup of molasses, which is ~48g sugar in two loaves. Leave the spoonful of sugar out your morning coffee and you'll be even with the sugar in your couple slices of toast.
Molasses has a lot of minerals in it, and the notion that eating fat makes you fat is a lie purpitrated by big sugar/grain that has lead to a lot of diabetes and heart desease, your grandmother knew where it was at! Also Big Sugar is an underrated band from Canada IMO
Would you expand on how nasty lard is? I had a quick search and the top result was a reddit thread of people breaking down the different fatty acids in lard and coming away surprised that the good outweighs the bad. I don't eat a lot of lard personally, but I'm not as concerned about it compared to microplastics or highly processed foods. Looking at the nutritional info on the side of the blackstrap molasses carton indicates a small amount of it covers a significant portion of daily intake for a few key minirals against less surgar then one puts in their coffee. I agree it's cake, but does a slice of generic sheet cake get part of your daily dose of iron, potassium, b2, b6, magnesium?
Sort I meant to say “shortening” and not lard … the former is just nasty synthetic stuff.
Certainly molasses is better than sugar, I’m just saying that brown bread is a tasty delicacy, but not something you would want to consume on the regular. The recipe I looked at called for 3/4 of a cup for a loaf of brown bread btw.
I bet you knew it was a treat, though. Compare to some folks’ daily sugar cereal diet… I dunno, unhealthy habits are usually unhealthy because they are habits.
I found a sort of fun blog post that points out that technically, it could be considered a pudding rather than a bread, because it is steamed rather than baked.
Although the consistency is more like a dense, very moist bread. It wouldn’t be great for a conventional sandwich. Could reasonably steal the English muffin’s job, though. Or a regular muffin. Maybe a bit messier.
Yeah when I think further on it, I've never heard of it here in Ontario. In Atlantic Canada though, it's definitely made with molasses. Google search results [1] suggests this is a regionalism (Atlantic Canada and new england states)
If I was offered brown bread and got a boring whole wheat, I'd be sorely disappointed.
My family were definitely not tourists, but come to think of it I don’t recall seeing the canned stuff in my friends’ houses. So maybe we were just locals who fell for a prank that was being played on the tourists, or something.
It isn’t, apparently, that’s what I’m upset about. Canada and New England are supposed go way back, longer than the countries. But apparently we didn’t share our bread technology advances.
It it rare in matters of taste to be able to say it, but you sir or madam are objectively incorrect!
Ok well, maybe that is a bit over the top. But anyway, since it comes in a can, hopefully anyone curious can just try it. Pop it in the toaster oven, put some cream cheese on it, and have it for breakfast. It is a treat, IMO.
> While brown bread may have contained some molasses in the early 1900s, post-WWII it was usually made without. So Canadian brown bread is, unlike Boston-style bread, not sweet (see the 1909 quotation) and also distinct from Irish brown bread, though the latter may have inspired it.
Brown bread is sweet, and you are supposed to cut it up into little hockey pucks and toast it. It is the perfect shape when it comes out of the can.