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Graham Muffins
1 quart Graham flour, 1 tablespoonful brown sugar, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls baking-powder, 1 egg, 1 pint milk. Sift together Graham flour, sugar, salt, and powder; add beaten egg and milk; mix into batter like pound cake; muffin-pans, well greased, two-thirds full; bake in hot oven fifteen minutes.
A plain whole-grain muffin from the era when Graham flour was a health food with a following. The one thing to fix before you start is the leavening: two teaspoons of baking powder for a quart of flour is well under modern practice.
- Leavening is shortFour cups of flour wants roughly 4 to 6 teaspoons of baking powder by modern practice. Expect dense, damp muffins if you follow the original figure literally.
- A quart of flourMeasured dry volume: about 4 cups, or roughly 1 lb / 450-480 g of Graham flour. A pint of milk is 2 cups.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour with the bran and germ left in, ground more roughly than modern whole-wheat. Stone-ground whole-wheat is the nearest match; adding a couple of tablespoons of wheat bran gets you closer to the original texture.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400-425F. Fifteen minutes is about right at that heat for standard muffin cups; test with a skewer at twelve.
- "Mix into batter like pound cake"Probably a guide to consistency rather than method: a thick batter that drops rather than pours. Stir only until the flour disappears; whole-grain batters toughen quickly.
- Let it standFive to ten minutes' rest before filling the pans lets the bran absorb liquid, which softens the crumb noticeably. Do not extend this much further or the baking powder will spend itself in the bowl.
- YieldRoughly 12 to 18 standard muffins, filled two-thirds as directed. Best eaten warm the day they are baked; the coarse flour stales fast.