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Graham Muffins
1 cup milk. 1 cup Graham flour. 1 cup white flour. 1/4 cup sugar or molasses. 1 teaspoon salt. 1 egg beaten very light. 2 tablespoons Cottolene. 4 teaspoons baking powder.
PROCESS: Sift together flours, sugar, salt and baking powder. Add milk gradually, egg beaten very light and melted Cottolene. Beat mixture thoroughly. Bake in hot, buttered, iron gem cups twenty-five minutes in a hot oven.
A straightforward baking-powder muffin, with one branded ingredient that no longer exists and one pan that has largely vanished from home kitchens.
- CottoleneA shortening of cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which published this book. Two tablespoons of melted butter, a neutral oil, or vegetable shortening does the same job.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, ground from the entire kernel and not sifted. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; ordinary whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer crumb.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400-425F. Muffins want the initial burst of heat to set the crust and drive the rise from the baking powder.
- Baking timeTwenty-five minutes assumes heavy iron gem cups, which take time to heat through. In a standard steel or nonstick muffin tin, start checking at 18 minutes.
- Iron gem cupsCast-iron gem pans have shallow cups, often oval. Preheat the pan in the oven before greasing and filling if you have one; a regular 12-cup muffin tin is otherwise fine.
- Sugar or molassesIf you use molasses, add it with the milk rather than sifting it with the dry ingredients, and expect a darker, slightly denser muffin.
- MixingDespite the instruction to "beat mixture thoroughly," mix only until the flour disappears; overworking a baking-powder batter produces tunnels and toughness.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins. Best eaten warm the day they are made.
52 Sunday Dinners was issued by the N. K. Fairbank Company, the Chicago manufacturer of Cottolene, and its recipes call for that shortening throughout — a cookbook that is also a sustained advertisement, a common publishing form in the decades around 1900 when cottonseed oil was being pushed as a cheaper, more "wholesome" alternative to lard. The flour in the title carries its own agenda: graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s and 40s who preached that unbolted, coarsely ground wheat was morally and physically superior to the white flour of commercial bakers. By the time this book appeared, that crusading edge had softened into a general sense that graham flour was simply good for you, and it turns up in muffins, gems and breads as the respectable half of a half-and-half blend with white flour — virtue, but not too much of it.