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Oatmeal Muffins
1 cupful oatmeal, 1 1/2 pints flour, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls baking-powder, 1 tablespoonful lard, 2 eggs, 1 pint milk. Sift together oatmeal, flour, salt, and powder; rub in lard cold, add beaten eggs and milk; mix smoothly into batter rather thinner than cup cake; fill muffin-pans two-thirds full; bake in good hot oven fifteen minutes.
A plain quick-bread batter from the era when muffin meant a gem-pan batter rather than a cake. The measurements are by volume in pints, and the oatmeal is not the rolled sort.
- Oatmeal means ground oatsOatmeal probably means ground oats -- Because the oatmeal is sifted with the flour, this most likely means milled oatmeal, fine or medium ground, of the kind sold as Scotch or Irish oatmeal, rather than rolled flakes. Rolled oats will not pass a sifter and give a coarser, chewier crumb; if you use them, stir them in rather than sifting and expect a heavier muffin.
- Volume conversions1 1/2 pints flour is 3 cups; 1 pint milk is 2 cups. With 1 cup oatmeal that makes a batter of roughly four cups of dry to two of liquid, plus two eggs.
- Leavening is light by modern standardsTwo teaspoonfuls of baking powder for four cups of dry ingredients is well under what a current recipe would use, though the two beaten eggs also contribute lift. Period baking powders were single-acting; 3 to 4 teaspoons suits today's product if you want a good rise.
- Good hot ovenRead that as a hot oven, roughly 400-425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat suits a standard muffin cup; deeper gem pans may need a few minutes longer.
- Rub in the lard coldThe single tablespoon of fat is worked into the dry mix like pastry, not creamed. Keep it cold and stop when it is evenly distributed -- the point is tenderness, not aeration.
- Batter consistency"Rather thinner than cup cake" means a batter that pours sluggishly from the spoon rather than dropping in lumps. Mix only until it comes together; extended beating toughens a quick bread of this type.
- Soaking helpsIf your oatmeal is coarse, letting the mixed batter stand ten minutes before filling the pans softens the grain and prevents a gritty crumb.
- YieldAbout 12 to 15 standard muffins. Grease the pans well -- with only a tablespoon of fat in the whole batch, these stick.
Oatmeal muffins turn up steadily in American recipe collections from the 1880s onward, at the point where oats moved from a Scottish and Irish porridge grain to a mass-marketed breakfast food in the United States. Rolled and cut oats in branded packages made the grain cheap and familiar in kitchens that had previously used cornmeal or nothing but wheat, and compilers began working it into batters, gems, and brown breads as an economy and a supposed health measure -- oats carried a reputation for being strengthening long before anyone measured soluble fibre. The recipe's structure is entirely of its period: pint measures, lard rather than butter, a small amount of chemical leavening, and the instruction to judge doneness by a "good hot oven" in a range with no thermometer on the door.