Home › Recipes › Plain Muffins
Plain Muffins
1/4 Cupful Snowdrift ¼ Cupful Sugar 1 Egg 1/2 Teaspoonful Salt 3 Teaspoonfuls Baking Powder ¾ Cupful Milk 2 Cupfuls Flour Stir the Snowdrift till creamy, gradually adding the sugar and the egg, well beaten.
Sift together the dry ingredients and add them alternately with the milk to the first mixture. Drop into muffin-pans well oiled with Snowdrift and bake from twenty-five to thirty minutes in a hot oven, 375 degrees F.
A straightforward creamed-fat muffin from a shortening manufacturer's booklet. The proportions are conventional once the fractions are read correctly.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening, sold in tins and promoted as a lard substitute. Use any solid vegetable shortening; softened unsalted butter works and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- The sugar and milk quantitiesAs printed, the sugar and milk figures have lost their fraction marks. For 2 cupfuls of flour the sensible readings are 1/4 cup sugar and 3/4 cup milk, which give a lightly sweetened muffin batter thick enough to drop from a spoon.
- OvenThe book gives the number itself: 375F. That is genuinely moderate-hot for muffins, and 25 to 30 minutes is on the long side by modern practice. Check at 18 to 20 minutes; a skewer should come out clean and the tops should be domed and set.
- Do not overmixThe alternating additions of dry ingredients and milk should be folded in only until no dry flour shows. Beating past that point develops gluten and produces tunnels and a tough, peaked muffin.
- Baking powderThree teaspoonfuls to two cups of flour is at the generous end by current standards. Two teaspoons is ample; more can leave a metallic aftertaste.
- "Well oiled with Snowdrift"Grease the cups generously, including the top rim, or use paper liners.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 standard muffins. Fill each cup two-thirds full.
Snowdrift was a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening marketed in the United States in the early twentieth century, and this book is a promotional cookbook of the kind cottonseed-oil and shortening companies distributed by the thousand to persuade home cooks away from lard and butter. The recipes are deliberately plain and repetitive, and the brand name is worked into every step, including the greasing of the pans. Plain muffins of this sort, leavened with baking powder rather than yeast, are the American "quick bread" tradition that spread rapidly after chemical leaveners became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century, allowing a hot bread to reach the breakfast table in half an hour rather than overnight.