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Corn Muffins
1 cup corn meal. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 cup white flour. 1 cup thin cream or milk. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 2 eggs beaten very light. 1/4 cup sugar. 2 tablespoons Cottolene.
PROCESS: Sift together corn meal, flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. Add cream or milk and stir to a smooth batter. Add well beaten eggs and melted butter. Beat thoroughly and bake in hot buttered gem cups in a hot oven twenty minutes.
A straightforward baking-powder muffin from a book written to sell shortening; the only real puzzles are the vessel, the fat and one contradiction between the ingredient list and the method.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, the product this whole cookbook was written to promote. Substitute 2 tablespoons of melted butter, vegetable shortening or a neutral oil; the recipe's own method line says butter, so the book effectively concedes the swap.
- The list-versus-method conflictThe ingredients call for Cottolene, the process says "melted butter." Use one fat, 2 tablespoons, melted and cooled slightly so it does not scramble the eggs.
- Gem cupsA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan with shallow, often oval cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; grease it well and, if using cast iron, heat it in the oven before filling for the crisp crust the recipe is after.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat is right for standard muffin cups; check at 15 minutes if your cups are shallow like true gem cups.
- Corn mealFine or medium yellow meal. Coarse stone-ground meal will read as gritty here since the batter is mixed and baked immediately with no soaking step.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of dry ingredients is high by current practice; period powders varied in strength, which may be part of the reason. Three teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives good lift without a metallic aftertaste.
- MixingIgnore "beat thoroughly." Fold the wet into the dry until just combined; overbeating a baking-powder batter gives tough muffins with tunnels.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins, or 8 to 9 large ones. Best within an hour of baking.
52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company as advertising for Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening of the later nineteenth century pitched to American cooks as a cheaper, lighter alternative to lard. That commercial purpose explains why the brand name appears in the ingredient list of a plain corn muffin, and why the printed instructions revert to butter. The muffin itself belongs to the late-nineteenth-century expansion of chemically leavened quick breads: reliable canned baking powder reached ordinary kitchens in the decades after the Civil War, and cornmeal batters that had once relied on eggs, yeast, or a hot griddle could be poured into a cast-iron gem pan and baked in twenty minutes. The sugar points north; southern corn breads of the same period generally used less, often none.