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Corn Muffins
One cup yellow corn meal, one-half cup flour, one tablespoon sugar, two teaspoons baking powder, one beaten egg, one and one-half cups sweet milk, a little salt; bake in hot greased gem pans.
— Mrs. F. Foland
A plain, lean cornbread batter with no fat in it at all — the greased pan does the work. It is wetter than a modern muffin batter, which is deliberate.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans are the ancestor of the muffin tin; a standard 12-cup tin works. Grease it generously and, for the crisp crust the recipe assumes, set the empty greased pan in the oven to heat before filling it.
- Oven heatThe recipe specifies hot greased pans rather than an oven setting; a hot oven, in the region of 425F, suits a batter like this. Bake 15-20 minutes, until the tops are set and dry and the edges have pulled slightly from the pan.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk used in soda-leavened baking. Whole milk is closest.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for 1 1/2 cups of dry ingredients is a little more than modern proportions, and period baking powders varied in strength. Reduce to 1 1/2 teaspoons if you find the crumb tastes metallic.
- No fatThere is no butter or drippings in the batter, so these dry out fast and are best eaten warm from the pan. A tablespoon of melted butter stirred in makes them keep past the first hour, at the cost of the original's austerity.
- Batter consistency1½ cups of milk to 1½ cups of dry gives something closer to a pourable batter than a scooped one. That is correct for cornmeal, which swells; let it stand five minutes before filling the pans, but do not overmix once the flour is wet.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 small muffins, or 8 standard-size ones.
Corn muffins sit at the meeting point of two economies: wheat flour, bought, and cornmeal, long the cheaper and more local grain in the Northeast. A cup of meal stretched with a half cup of flour reflects a period when white flour was affordable enough to lighten cornbread without displacing meal altogether. The yellow meal specified is the northern preference; southern cooks of the same decades more often called for white, and were less likely to add sugar. The "gem pan" of the instruction was a common fixture of nineteenth-century American kitchens, and the community-cookbook habit of naming the contributor, here Mrs. F. Foland, is what makes these books a record of a particular place rather than a general manual.