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Wheat Muffins
One pint of milk, three cups of flour, three teaspoons of baking powder, one egg and a small piece of butter, also a tablespoon of sugar.
— Miss Addie Jackson
A contributor's shorthand from a village fundraiser book: ingredients only, no method, no oven, no pan. The proportions are sound, and the gaps are all conventional ones a cook of the 1890s would have filled in without thinking.
- The batter is meant to be looseA pint of milk (2 cups) to 3 cups of flour gives a batter far looser than a modern stiff muffin dough, though not as thin as a popover batter. Resist the urge to add flour, and expect a light, open crumb.
- "A small piece of butter"Read this as about 2 tablespoons, melted and cooled slightly before it goes into the milk and beaten egg. Larger amounts weigh the batter down; this is a lean muffin by design, with a single tablespoon of sugar.
- Salt is missingContributed ingredient lists of this kind often omit it. Add half a teaspoon with the flour and baking powder, or the muffins taste flat.
- Oven temperatureThe receipt gives none; a hot oven, around 425F, suits this batter. The lift comes chiefly from the three teaspoons of baking powder, so get the muffins in promptly once mixed.
- Pans and timingGrease muffin or gem pans well and heat them before filling if you want a crisp bottom. Fill two-thirds full and bake 20 to 25 minutes, until browned and firm to a light press in the center.
- MixingWhisk the dry ingredients, combine the wet, and stir together only until the flour disappears. Overworked batter with this much baking powder gives tunnels and a tough crumb.
- YieldAbout a dozen standard muffins, or eight or nine in large gem cups. They are best within an hour of baking and stale quickly, being low in fat and sugar.
The Catskill Cook Book belongs to a genre that flourished in American villages from the 1860s onward, beginning with the Civil War sanitary-fair volumes: recipes solicited from local women, printed under their own names, and sold to raise money for a church, library or relief society. The attributions are the point: whose muffins these were. Calling them "wheat muffins" was a useful distinction in a period when a breakfast bread was as likely to be made from cornmeal, graham flour, rye or rice, and "wheat" signalled the plainest and most refined of the options. The reliance on baking powder rather than saleratus and sour milk marks the receipt as a late one; commercial baking powders had become cheap and trusted household staples by the last quarter of the century, and recipes of this kind — a list of proportions, with the method assumed — are often associated with that shift.