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Graham Muffins
Three cups of Graham flour, one cup white flour, one quart milk, one half cup yeast, (or one good yeast cake,) one tablespoon lard or butter, a little salt, two tablespoons sugar. Set to rise over night and bake in muffin rings about twelve minutes. can be baked in gem pans.
An overnight yeast-raised batter rather than a modern baking-powder muffin. The proportions give a pourable batter, not a dough, and that is intentional.
- The hinge: it is a batterA quart of milk to four cups of flour makes something closer to thick pancake batter than muffin dough. Do not add flour to stiffen it. The slack batter is what gives these their open, popover-ish crumb once the yeast has worked overnight.
- Graham flourCoarse, unsifted whole wheat, named for Sylvester Graham and still sold under that name. Ordinary whole wheat flour is the closest substitute. Because the germ is left in, it goes rancid; buy it fresh and keep it cold.
- Yeast quantity"One good yeast cake" is the alternative to the half cup of liquid yeast, which would have been a home-made or bakers' barm of unknowable strength; period yeast cakes varied, and the modern 0.6 oz compressed cake is only an approximate stand-in. About 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast is a workable equivalent for an overnight rise; less if your kitchen is warm.
- Overnight riseThe instruction assumes a cool kitchen and a long, slow rise. In a modern 70F house the batter can over-ferment and turn sour and slack; a cool room or the refrigerator overnight is likely closer to the intended result.
- No temperature givenTwelve minutes suggests a hot oven; somewhere around 425 to 450F is a reasonable modern guess. Greasing and preheating the pans before pouring in the batter helps lift a wet batter.
- Muffin rings and gem pansMuffin rings are open metal hoops set on a griddle or baking sheet. Gem pans are the heavy cast-iron trays used alongside and before the lighter modern muffin tin, and a preheated cast-iron muffin pan behaves the same way. A standard tin works, though it may need a little longer than the twelve minutes given.
- Lard and sugarOne tablespoon of fat and two of sugar across a quart of milk is very lean and barely sweet by current expectations. Hot bread of this kind was generally buttered at table.
- YieldRoughly 18 to 24 standard muffins. The batter does not keep well once risen — bake it all.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham (1794 certainly1851), a Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer who preached that coarse, unsifted, home-ground wheat flour was morally and physically superior to the fine white flour of commercial bakers. In time the polemic faded and "Graham" had simply become the American word for whole wheat: Graham bread, Graham gems, Graham crackers. The recipe's mixture of Graham and white flour is a compromise typical of the period — enough bran for the virtue, enough white flour for the rise. The recipe reflects a household that expected hot bread on the table in the morning, which is why the work is done the night before with yeast rather than in twenty minutes with baking powder.