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Golden Corn Muffins
1 cupful flour 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful yellow cornmeal 3 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 cupful milk 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful salt 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder Cream Crisco an sugar thoroughly together, add eggs well beaten and milk. Then stir in slowly dry ingredients which have been sifted together three times. Divide into greased gem pans and bake in moderately hot oven twenty-five minutes.
Sufficient for twelve muffins.
A straightforward half-and-half cornbread muffin from a Crisco promotional cookbook; the only things needing translation are the pan, the oven and the fat.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin tin; they were made in various sizes, and this recipe assumes one holding twelve. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; grease it well, and if you use iron, heat it in the oven first for a crisper crust.
- "Moderately hot oven"Read this as 400F. A moderate oven is 350F, a quick or hot one 425-450F; muffins of this size are done at 400F in about 20 minutes, so start checking well before the twenty-five the recipe allows.
- CriscoThe book was published to sell it, hence the branded fat in nearly every recipe. Any solid vegetable shortening substitutes directly, as does softened butter, which will change the flavor at the cost of a slightly firmer crumb.
- Creaming a shorteningTwo tablespoons of fat is a small amount to cream with three tablespoons of sugar. Work it until it looks pale and sandy rather than expecting a fluffy mass, then beat in the eggs and milk.
- Sifting three timesThis mattered when flour was lumpy and baking powder poorly distributed. One good sift, or a thorough whisk of the flour, cornmeal, salt and baking powder, does the same job now.
- Mix minimallyThe instruction to "stir in slowly" is not an invitation to beat the batter. Fold only until no dry flour shows; overmixing gives tough muffins with tunnels.
- Cornmeal grindThe recipe specifies only yellow cornmeal, which at this date would most likely have been a commercial fine-to-medium meal. Stone-ground meal takes up liquid more slowly and gives a coarser crumb, so let the batter stand five minutes before filling the cups if you use it.
- Yield and servingTwelve muffins, as stated, from cups filled about two-thirds. They are barely sweet by modern standards and are meant to go on the dinner table with butter, not to be eaten as a sweet.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century cookbooks written to promote a single manufactured product, in this case Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening Procter & Gamble introduced in 1911 as a substitute for lard and butter. That accounts for the two tablespoons of branded fat in an otherwise conventional muffin. The recipe itself is standard Northern cornbread of the period: equal parts wheat flour and cornmeal, sweetened lightly, leavened with baking powder rather than the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method, and baked in iron gem pans, which were common kitchen equipment at the time. The half-wheat proportion is the tell — Southern cornbread of the same date generally used cornmeal alone and little or no sugar, and the divide between the two styles was already established when this book was printed.