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Muffins (Two eggs one pint of milk)
Two eggs, one pint of milk, three cups of flour, three tablespoons of sugar, two teaspoons of baking powder, and a little salt.
— Mrs. Eugene A. Chilson
A bare list of proportions with no method, no fat and no oven temperature — typical of a community cookbook where the contributor assumed everyone knew what to do with a gem pan. The batter is much thinner than a modern muffin batter, and that is deliberate.
- The batter is meant to be thinA pint of milk (2 cups) to three cups of flour gives something closer to pancake or popover batter than to a stiff modern muffin dough. Resist the urge to add flour; the loose batter is what produces the light, hollow, steam-risen crumb these were made for.
- No fat, by designNo fat listed -- There is no butter or shortening in the list, whether deliberately or because the contributor left it unsaid. Muffins of this sort tend to bake up with a crisper shell rather than a tender, cakey crumb, and are best eaten hot, split and buttered at the table.
- Grease the pans wellWith no fat in the batter, cast-iron gem pans or muffin cups must be thoroughly greased and preheated hot before the batter goes in. Cold pans give sticking and a pale, heavy bottom.
- Oven temperatureThe receipt gives none. A hot oven, 425F, for 20 to 25 minutes suits a thin batter of this kind; the high heat sets the shell before the muffin can collapse.
- MixingBeat the eggs with the milk, then stir in the dry ingredients only until combined. Lumps are acceptable and overbeating will toughen them, though this batter is more forgiving than a rich one.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for three cups of flour is on the low side by current practice, which runs closer to a teaspoon or more per cup. Baking powders of this period were commonly single-acting, so it is safer to get the batter into the oven promptly rather than let it stand.
- YieldAbout a dozen standard muffins, or 18 or so in small gem pans.
Community cookbooks like this one are generally understood to have traded in proportions rather than procedures: a contributor would send in the ratio she carried in her head, and the printer set it as one sentence with her name attached. The result reads as incomplete to us but was perfectly usable to a cook who had made muffins weekly for thirty years. This particular formula belongs to the older family of batter muffins — sometimes called gems, after the heavy cast-iron gem pans sold from the mid-nineteenth century onward — which were poured rather than spooned and relied on egg and steam as much as on chemical leavening. Baking powder had been commercially available in America since the 1850s, though the saleratus-and-sour-milk method persisted alongside it in community cookbooks well into the twentieth century.