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Bran Muffins
Two cups of bran, one cup of flour, two tablespoons of molasses, one cup of sour milk, one teaspoon of saleratus, one tablespoon of melted butter. Beat, and bake in muffin pans.
— Miss Charlotte C. Beach
A plain, thrifty muffin from the days when bran was a by-product of the household flour barrel rather than a health food. The receipt assumes you know how hot to make the oven and how thick the batter should be; here are the missing parts.
- Saleratus is baking sodaSaleratus is (near enough) baking soda -- Saleratus was sold as potassium bicarbonate earlier in the century and as sodium bicarbonate later; by the late 1800s the two names were used more or less interchangeably, so read one teaspoon of saleratus as one teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. It works only against the acid in the sour milk, so the two must go together — soda alone with sweet milk will leave a soapy, yellowish crumb.
- Sour milkThis meant milk that had clabbered naturally at room temperature, which pasteurised milk will not do safely. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup, or stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Muffins of this sort want a fairly quick oven, around 400F, so the soda spends itself quickly and the tops set before the centres dry out. Twenty minutes is usually enough for a standard tin.
- Which branNineteenth-century bran was coarse wheat bran, not the ready-to-eat cereal sold under that name. Use plain unprocessed miller's bran or wheat bran flakes from the baking aisle; breakfast bran cereal is sweetened and will throw the balance off.
- Salt is missingThe receipt calls for no salt. One tablespoon of butter, even salted, contributes very little, so add half a teaspoon of salt to the dry ingredients.
- Batter consistencyTwo cups of bran to one cup of milk gives a very stiff mixture. Bran drinks liquid slowly, so let the batter stand five minutes after mixing and add milk by the spoonful until it drops thickly from a spoon rather than holding its shape.
- MolassesUse a mild unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and much darker. The two tablespoons are the only sweetening in the receipt, so these are barely sweet muffins.
- YieldAbout ten standard muffins, or eight generous ones. Grease the pans well — there is very little fat in the batter and bran sticks.
Bran muffins belong to the economy of a household that bought or ground its own wheat and had bran left over, either fed to stock or used to stretch the bread and biscuit. Molasses and sour milk mark the receipt as an older style of quick baking: molasses because refined sugar was the dearer sweetener, sour milk because a farm kitchen always had some, and saleratus because it was the leavening that came into commercial use gradually from around the 1830s and 1840s, before it was standardised and rebranded as baking soda. Cookbooks of this kind, apparently gathered from the women of a place, preserve exactly this sort of receipt — brief, unmeasured in oven heat, attributed by name, and written for a cook who already knew the method and only needed reminding of the proportions.