Margery Wilson
BERRY MUFFINS
1/4 cup butter 1/3 cup sugar 4 teaspoons Royal baking powder 1 egg 2 2/3 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 cup berries Cream and butter; add gradually sugar and egg, well beaten; mix and sift flour, baking powder, and salt, reserving one-fourth to be mixed with berries and added last; the remainder alternately with milk. Sincerely yours,
A plain creamed-batter muffin of the sort that filled American cookbooks once chemical baking powder became reliable. Two of the quantities in the ingredient list have not survived cleanly, and the method breaks off before baking, so treat this as a framework rather than a formula to follow blindly.
- The flour quantity is unreadableThe list gives "2 22/3 cups flour," which cannot be resolved with confidence; the likeliest reading is 2 2/3 cups with a stray digit. For a batter built on 1 cup of milk and 1 egg, a quantity in that range is what comparable muffin recipes tend to use; anything more will give a dry, scone-like crumb.
- The sugar is also doubtful"1½ cup sugar" is high for a muffin with only 1/4 cup butter, and may be a misreading of 1/2 cup, which is nearer the usual proportion for a batter of this type. If you bake it, start at the lower end.
- "Cream and butter"This is a slip for "cream the butter" -- beat the softened butter alone until light before the sugar goes in, then the beaten egg.
- Royal baking powderA branded cream-of-tartar powder, widely advertised in books of this kind. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure; 4 teaspoons is on the generous side for the amount of flour indicated.
- Flouring the berriesThe instruction to reserve a quarter of the dry mixture and toss it with the fruit is the whole point of the method. Coated berries stay suspended in the batter instead of sinking and bleeding, and it works with blueberries, huckleberries or raspberries alike.
- MixingAlternate the remaining flour with the milk and stop while the batter still looks lumpy. Beating a muffin batter smooth develops gluten and gives tunnels and a tough crust.
- Oven and time, which the original omitsThe method ends before baking. Muffins of this size and richness are conventionally baked in a hot oven, 400-425F, in greased tins for 20 to 25 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- YieldThe batter as written fills roughly a dozen standard muffin cups.
Celebrity cookbooks compiled from screen and stage performers were a staple fundraising and publicity format in the silent era and after, and the contributions were often short, domestic and unremarkable -- the point was the signature, not the dish. Margery Wilson, an actress and director who later made a career writing on poise and self-presentation, offers exactly the kind of everyday creamed-batter muffin that a household would have made with a can of branded baking powder on the shelf. The trick of dredging fruit in reserved flour before folding it in is older than the recipe and appears throughout nineteenth-century American baking; it is one of the few genuinely durable pieces of technique in books of this sort.