Graduate students compete in a brown bread bake-off to celebrate a Boston favorite

History Department graduate students Isabel Frey Ribeiro, Saffron Sener, and Riley Sutherland (from left to right) with their brown bread loaves. 
 

On March 26th, 2026, the Harvard in 1776 Initiative hosted its “Remembering the Revolution: The Siege of Boston” Symposium with a reception to follow in Robinson Hall. At our reception, we held a Brown Bread Bake-Off featuring graduate students’ delicious interpretations of a Boston classic: brown bread! (for more information on brown bread and its longstanding local importance, check out this webpage!) Votes were placed via Boston Baked Bean candies, and the competition was close, but we’d like to give a big congratulations to Isabel Frey Ribeiro for winning the Bake-Off!

To commemorate this fun event and graduate students’ culinary creations, we interviewed participants of the Bake-Off. Read more about their experiences below!
 

Why did you decide to participate in the Brown Bread Bake-Off?

[Isabel Frey Ribeiro] I knew I wanted to participate as soon as we got the announcement! I love baking swaps and competitions of all sorts, and if they're historical — even better!  I loved the historical detail in the recipe that allowed me to imagine who would have been eating this, when, where, and why (because wheat wasn't so plentiful in New England, for example!).

[Saffron Sener] I love to bake historical recipes whenever I get the chance — I’ve done it before for classes and I think it’s such a fun challenge that brings an incredibly tangible (and hopefully tasty) historical dimension to the classroom. I was a bit scared of trying my hand at brown bread, since I knew it had special steps involved, but that was part of the excitement, too.

[Riley K. Sutherland] I’m by no means a baker, but I find food history really interesting and am going to engage with it in my dissertation. The bake-off seemed like a fun way to explore this interest outside the archives.

Did you have previous baking experience when you entered?

[IFR] A bit! I'm no baker by any means, but as I mentioned I tend to enter bake-offs or bake sales whenever they arise. Most of my day-to-day baking comes from a box, but I've been known to try wackier recipes from scratch now and again! To varying degrees of success.

[SS] Yes! I love baking. I don’t do it as often as I’d like, but if there’s an excuse to bring a handmade baked good somewhere, I will definitely show up with one (or maybe two).

[RKS] A little bit! Growing up, I spent time in the kitchen with my mom, but I didn’t help her so much as talk to her while she did the actual work. (Everyone needs entertainment, right?) I didn’t really start baking until college, because I was allergic to most of the dining hall food and got tired of living on microwave potatoes. I don’t bake so much anymore, and—although I probably shouldn’t admit this—baking isn’t my favorite. But I don’t mind it, especially when it gives me a chance to connect with family in the kitchen.

Had you heard of brown bread before the Bake-Off?

[IFR] Never! I'm from New Orleans so, no, I'd never heard of it…. When I first googled it and saw it in a can, I did not have high hopes. Bread in a can? I imagined how it would wobble. It was not a pretty image.

[SS] Yes, but only because I’d see cans of it in the grocery store. I’d never had it, but imagined it was a dense, somewhat dry bread like a gingerbread. I didn’t realize the tin can was part of the baking process.

[RKS] Also never! In fact, when I mentioned brown bread to some friends, they said, “you mean like the dark bread in the Cheesecake Factory basket?” I imagined the same thing. When I actually looked it up, I realized it’s more like a hot cross bun? I was just so relieved to learn it’s not yeasted, because I struggle getting bread to rise in my drafty apartment. I’ve spent a lot of time heating dough with heating pads and hair dryers for that reason…

What was the baking process like? Anything unexpected or surprising?

[IFR] Fun! It was surprisingly easy. Usually my baking enemies are: the oven and the rising agent. This recipe had neither! Mixing the dough (or rather, batter), it looked — I have to admit — pretty icky, but many things do, before they're baked. Honestly, the hardest part was deciding what canned goods to buy and how to dispose of them quickly so I would have 3 tin cans available for baking! (Tomato — pasta sauce, tomato — pasta sauce, artichokes — salad).

[SS] I agree with Isabel — it was easier than I expected. The involvement of steaming and tin cans intimidated me, but it was alright. I didn’t have raisins or currants (which the historical recipes call for), so I replaced them with dried cherries, which turned out way better than I expected. Overall, the process was much more straightforward than I had expected, especially since I generally steer away from breads because they can be very intensive. But making brown bread reminded me a lot of the mid-century Betty Crocker quick breads my mom would bake when I was growing up, like zucchini bread, since it’s more of a batter than a dough. So there was some nostalgia for me, which was a sweet surprise!

[RKS] I think I found the process more difficult, but that’s because I couldn’t actually sample the bread—I can’t eat gluten! So I enlisted my family's help. My mom is an amateur baker, a chemist, and a history enthusiast, so when I told her about the bake-off, she dug into the family’s cookbook collection to compare recipes. I tried the first test over spring break. The loaf came out well in terms of texture and structure, but my family said it was unpleasantly bitter. This didn’t surprise us: my mom and I have experimented with seventeenth and eighteenth-century bakes before, and they typically come out too bitter for modern taste, for a variety of reasons: historically, refined sugar was more expensive and therefore less popular, produce wasn’t engineered for extreme sweetness, etc. So to make these bakes palatable for modern diets, you usually have to sweeten them. My second loaf was an adapted, “modern”/sweet loaf. That was tricky to make because sugar is chemically a tenderizer and structural inhibitor. It bonds with water, and also makes it harder for proteins to interact—for instance, for egg proteins to solidify. That means even after trying to balance the amount of sugar, my “modern” cake was much wetter and lumpier than the historical one. I was so self-conscious about that weird little lumpy loaf. (Is it going to be gummy? Wobbly?). I still wanted to serve both loaves side by side to underscore not just changes in taste over time, but also how those changes have chemically altered the structure of food.

Did you like the taste of brown bread? Would you eat it again?

[IFR] It wasn't bad. When I asked a friend what he thought, he said: “It tastes like it would get you through winter,” and I think that more or less encapsulates it perfectly. It's dense and has a pretty deep flavor. It certainly tasted better than I expected. And, it certainly tastes better if you imagine the context in which it would have been eaten. The Revolutionary period is not my main period of study, but… if I imagine myself (and this is pure imagination) mucking out a horse stall, washing clothes by hand (and now my hands are raw and calloused) and then mending clothes for my five young children running amok, scrubbing floors, perhaps peeling vegetables for the stew I have to serve daily at the tavern my husband owns, and then serving a crowd of rowdy townsmen cider, AND THEN: after all that, thinking about baking traditional bread in a wood oven, when flour is already scarce and there is a whole brood out there to feed? No thank you. Give me stovetop pudding anytime, please. And it will taste delicious.

[SS] I totally didn’t expect this to be my experience, but I actually really liked it. My fear of canned bread led me astray all these years. I do really enjoy molasses-y breads, and make other versions around the holidays every year, so I have a predisposition to the flavor profile. Butter was essential, and lots of it; I added flaky salt and like I said before, dried cherries to mine (so, at this point, I was taking a lot of room for creative interpretations), and it was really good. I also loved the rye flour flavor, and am inspired to bake more with it.

[RKS] I can’t have gluten, and I wasn’t about to make a gluten-free brown bread, because that would change the bread’s historical integrity and also its chemical qualities too much for my first bake—and, let’s be honest, gluten is what makes food taste good, so I didn’t want to serve folks, including historians whom I really respect, a gluten-free loaf! That means I have still never actually eaten brown bread. But I love molasses and raisins, so I imagine I’d like it. Regardless of the taste, I loved the process of baking it, especially because it gave me a memory I can share with my family.