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Columbia Muffins
3 tablespoonfuls sugar 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 egg 1 1/2 cupfuls milk 1 teaspoonful salt 3 1/2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 3 1/2 cupfuls sifted flour Sift flour, salt, and baking powder together. Cream Crisco and sugar, add egg well beaten, then milk and flour mixture. Divide into Criscoed add floured gem pans and bake twenty-five minutes in hot oven.
Sufficient for twenty muffins.
A plain Crisco-era muffin, mixed by the creaming method rather than the quick stir-together most modern recipes use. A few of the instructions need translating before the pans go in.
- Gem pansGem pans were heavy cast-iron muffin trays with small, deep cups, closer to 1/4 cup capacity than the 1/2 cup of a standard modern muffin tin. That is how twenty muffins come out of this batter; in a modern 12-cup tin you will get about twelve, filled two-thirds.
- Hot ovenFor a book of this period a hot oven is usually taken to mean roughly 400-425F. At that heat, muffins in a modern tin are likely to be done in 15-20 minutes rather than the twenty-five the original gives for smaller iron gems that took longer to heat through. Test with a skewer at 15 minutes.
- "Criscoed and floured"The original has a typo ("Criscoed add floured"). Grease the cups with shortening and dust with flour, or use paper liners. Gem pans were often greased and heated before the batter went in, though this recipe does not say to; a preheated pan tends to give a better rise and a crisper crust.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold and behaves as intended here, though the formula has changed since the 1910s and no longer contains partially hydrogenated oil. Equal weight of butter works and tastes better, but the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- A stiff batterThree and a half cups of flour to one and a half cups of milk gives a thick, almost spoonable batter, closer to a biscuit dough than a pourable muffin mix. That is correct for the period. If it seems unworkably dry, an extra tablespoon or two of milk is within reason.
- Do not beat the flour inThe creaming step is fine, but once the flour mixture goes in, stir only until no dry streaks remain. Continued beating develops gluten and produces tunnels and a tough, peaked muffin.
- Baking powderThree and a half teaspoons for three and a half cups of flour is a full teaspoon per cup, which is in line with modern practice of roughly 1 to 1.25 teaspoons per cup. Use double-acting powder and bake promptly.
- ServingUnsweetened by modern standards at three tablespoons of sugar across twenty muffins. Given the book's title they were most likely intended as table breads for dinner, split hot and buttered rather than as breakfast pastry.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as an advertising cookbook for Crisco, which came on the market in 1911 and is usually credited as the first widely sold all-vegetable shortening. The recipes in the book call for it throughout, and the verb "to Crisco" a pan appears repeatedly a small piece of brand-building that never entered general English. The muffin itself is unremarkable American quick bread of the type that spread through the second half of the nineteenth century once chemical leavening became reliable and cheap; what is being sold is the fat. Names like Columbia, Federal and Empire were attached freely to plain recipes in this era with no particular geographic meaning, and there is no evidence linking these muffins to any specific place or institution.