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Graham Muffins
Two cups of sour milk, two table-spoons brown sugar, a little salt,. one tea-spoon soda, sufficient Graham flour to make moderately stiff. If not convenient to use sour milk, use sweet, adding cream of tartar.-Mrs. H. B. Sherman.
A one-line formula of the kind that assumed the cook already knew what muffin batter should look like. The whole thing hinges on the soda meeting an acid, so the milk matters more than anything else here.
- Sour milk means buttermilkNineteenth-century sour milk was raw milk left to clabber, tart and slightly thickened. Cultured buttermilk is the honest modern equivalent; pasteurised milk left on the counter spoils rather than sours and should not be used.
- The sweet-milk substitutionIf using sweet milk, the standard period ratio is two teaspoons cream of tartar to the one teaspoon of soda, sifted into the flour. Alternatively, souring two cups of milk with two tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar keeps the recipe as written.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, unsifted, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is close; ordinary fine whole-wheat flour works but gives a smoother, less nutty crumb.
- "Moderately stiff"A thick drop batter that mounds on the spoon and does not pour in a stream — roughly 2½ to 3 cups of Graham flour for two cups of milk. Mix only until the flour disappears; the soda begins working immediately and beating develops gluten in whole-wheat flour just as it does in white.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. In modern terms, bake at about 425F for 20 to 25 minutes. Grease the tins and, if you have cast-iron gem pans, heat them in the oven first so the batter sets on contact.
- Salt and sugar"A little salt" is about half a teaspoon. Two tablespoons of brown sugar in twelve muffins makes these barely sweet by current standards — a breakfast bread meant for butter, not a cupcake.
- YieldTwelve standard muffins. Best eaten within an hour of baking; whole-wheat quick breads with no fat in the batter stale quickly.
Graham flour carries the name of Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose 1830s lectures urged coarse unbolted wheat, cold water and plain living on an America he thought overfed on white bread and meat. By the time Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, the polemics had faded but the flour had stuck, and Graham gems, muffins and bread turn up throughout the book as ordinary breakfast fare rather than reform diet. The recipe also shows the working chemistry of the period kitchen: sour milk was a byproduct every household with a milk cow had on hand, and soda was the cheap way to make it lift a batter. The alternative given — sweet milk plus cream of tartar — is essentially baking powder assembled from its parts, which is how many cooks still did it before commercial powders became universally trusted. The attribution to Mrs. H. B. Sherman is typical; the book was compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives, and the terse, memory-jogging style is that of a recipe copied out for a neighbour who already knew how it should look.