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Sour Milk Tea Cakes
1 cupful cornmeal 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 eggs 1 1/2 cupfuls sour milk 2 cupfuls flour 3/4 cupful sugar 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful lemon extract Beat up the eggs, add meal and milk and mix well, add flour, sugar, soda, and salt sifted together. Now add extract and Crisco, melted, and beat two minutes. Divide into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake in moderate oven fifteen minutes.
Sufficient for sixteen cakes.
A straightforward sour-milk cornmeal muffin from the Crisco-sponsored era of American cookbooks. Two things need translating: the milk and the pans.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic, which reacts with the soda for lift. Pasteurised milk left out will spoil rather than sour. Use buttermilk, or 1 1/2 cups milk with 1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans came in various sizes, commonly six to twelve small, deep cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; filling sixteen cups means two tins or two batches. Grease and flour as directed, or use papers.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Fifteen minutes is right for small gem-pan cakes; standard muffin cups will want 18-20 minutes, tested with a skewer.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, hence the verb "Criscoed." Any neutral solid shortening works, or melted butter for better flavour, measured at 4 tablespoons (1/4 cup).
- CornmealFine or medium yellow cornmeal. The meal is mixed with the milk and eggs before the flour goes in; keep that order, though the recipe allows no standing time, so any softening of the grain is brief.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon is assertive by modern taste. Half a teaspoon, or the grated zest of one lemon, gives a cleaner result.
- Don't overbeat"Beat two minutes" belongs to the era's cake technique and will toughen a muffin batter. Mix until the flour just disappears, then stop.
- YieldSixteen small cakes, or twelve standard muffins. Best warm; they stale quickly, as most cornmeal quickbreads do.
This comes from a genre of cookbook that was really advertising: A Calendar of Dinners was issued by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening launched in 1911 as a substitute for lard and butter. The recipe itself is much older in spirit — sour milk with saleratus or soda was a standard American leavening system for much of the nineteenth century, a way of using milk that had turned before refrigeration was common, and cornmeal stretched the more expensive wheat flour. What the branded books did was quietly swap the fat: where a farm receipt would have said butter or drippings, the page now says Crisco, and even the pan gets "Criscoed." Muffins of this kind, half cornbread and half sweet cake, were breakfast and tea food rather than dessert.