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Imperial Muffins
1/2 cupful scalded milk 1/4 cupful sugar 1/4 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt 1/3 yeast cake 3/4 cupful lukewarm water 1 3/4 cupful flour 1 cupful cornmeal Add sugar and salt to milk; when lukewarm add yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cupful of the water, and 1 1/4 cupfuls flour, cover, and let rise until light, then add Crisco, cornmeal, remaining flour and water. Let rise over night, in morning fill Criscoed muffin rings, two-thirds full; let rise until rings are full and bake thirty minutes in hot oven.
Sufficient for twelve muffins.
A yeast-raised cornmeal muffin built on an overnight sponge, from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. Nothing here is difficult, but the timing spans two days and the quantities are written for equipment most kitchens no longer own.
- Plan for two daysThe hinge is the overnight rest. The first sponge (milk, sugar, salt, yeast dissolved in part of the water, 1 1/4 cups flour) rises until light, perhaps an hour at room temperature; only then do the fat, cornmeal, remaining flour and water go in for the overnight rise.
- The yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes of the period were commonly around 0.6 oz, though sizes varied, so a third of one is roughly 1/4 teaspoon of instant or 1/2 teaspoon of active dry yeast. Such a small amount suits a long overnight rise.
- Scalding the milkScalding raw milk was standard practice, and is usually explained as deactivating substances in the milk that weaken gluten. With pasteurized milk it is generally treated as unnecessary; warm it to lukewarm and proceed. If you do scald it, cool it before adding the yeast.
- CriscoIntroduced only a few years before this book and the reason the book exists. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and butter is a fine substitute at the same volume, though it will brown the crust faster.
- CornmealUse fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not self-rising cornmeal mix, which carries its own leavening and salt. Coarse meal will not soften enough overnight and reads as gritty.
- Muffin ringsThese are straight-sided metal rings about 3 to 3 1/2 inches across and an inch deep, set on a greased griddle or baking sheet — English muffin rings, not a cupcake pan. A standard 12-cup muffin tin filled two-thirds full is the usual modern stand-in; the muffins will be taller and domed rather than flat-topped.
- Hot ovenRead that as 400 to 425F. Thirty minutes suits the shallow rings; in a deep muffin tin start checking at 20 minutes and pull them when the centers read about 200F.
- YieldTwelve, as stated. They are best the day they are baked, and split and toasted thereafter.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had reached the market only a few years earlier, in 1911. That accounts for the odd verb in the instructions — muffin rings are "Criscoed" rather than greased — and for the presence of a hydrogenated vegetable shortening in a recipe that a generation earlier would have used lard or butter. The muffin itself is older than the book: a yeast-leavened cornmeal batter, cooked in rings and split rather than sliced, belongs to the same family as the English muffin and the American breakfast "gems" and Sally Lunns that filled nineteenth-century bread chapters. The name is most likely marketing gloss of the sort common in the period, when "imperial," "royal" and "queen" were often attached to ordinary things to suggest richness; nothing about the formula is regal beyond a quarter cup each of sugar and fat.