Massachusetts and Connecticut

Massachusetts is easy, because that's where we live.   We made brown bread and baked beans for our meal.   The catch on making the brown bread is that it should be steamed, not baked.   This was traditionally done in a large tin can such as a coffee can.  But who has coffee can's these days?!   The coffee we buy comes in cardboard cans.


I almost gave up and decided to bake the bread, but then I noticed that it can be done in a slow cooker.  Voila!  We put the bread batter into a casserole dish, covered it with a lid, and put it in the slow cooker surrounded with water.   Worked like a charm.

We did cheat on the baked beans since we were pressed for time and don't have a pressure cooker.   Rather than starting from scratch, I used my mom's old recipe for doctoring canned baked beans.   First you drain the beans, then cook them with onion, green pepper, bacon, ketchup, mustard and brown sugar.

Connecticut was a fun find.   There is a cake called "Election Day cake" or "Hartford Election cake" that originated in Hartford back when women did not yet vote.   It is a yeast coffee cake, not too sweet, with fruit and nuts in it.  We used golden raisins because we had dark raisins in the brown bread.  The cake is usually made in a tube pan, but we made a half recipe in a loaf pan instead.

An amusing point to this meal is that our bread had leavening normally used for cake (baking soda) and our cake had leavening normally used for bread (yeast)!