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Cocoanut Bran Muffins
2 cups bran, sterilized ¾ cup flour ¼ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking soda 2 tablespoons sugar 1 egg, beaten 1½ cups sour cream or milk 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut Mix bran, flour, salt and soda together, add sugar, egg, milk and cocoanut. Divide into greased gem or muffin pans and bake in a very moderate oven for 25 minutes. If desired, Dromedary Dates, cut into small pieces, can be substituted for cocoanut.
A plain soda-risen bran muffin from a Dromedary advertising booklet, leaning on sour milk for lift. It comes together in one bowl and wants a light hand.
- The fractionsThe quantities are three-quarters of a cup of flour, a quarter teaspoon of salt, and one and a half cups of sour cream or milk. The flour-to-bran ratio is deliberately low, so expect a dark, coarse, tender muffin rather than a cakey one.
- "Very moderate oven"Generally taken as somewhere around 325-350F; the book gives no temperature. The recipe specifies 25 minutes for either gem or muffin pans, so check small gem pans earlier.
- Sour milk and the sodaThe teaspoon of baking soda needs the acid in genuinely soured milk or cultured sour cream to work. Ultra-pasteurised milk left on the counter spoils rather than sours; use buttermilk, or stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar into whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- "Sterilized" branPeriod bran was sometimes heated to kill insect eggs and check rancidity. Modern packaged wheat bran needs nothing, though a few minutes in a dry pan improves the flavour. Note this is loose miller's bran, not bran cereal flakes.
- The cocoanutDromedary sold packaged shredded coconut, most likely sweetened. Sweetened flaked coconut is the closest match; if you use unsweetened, you may want to raise the sugar or the muffins will taste flat.
- MixingStir only until the flour disappears. The batter is wet and soda-leavened, so it should go into the pans and the oven promptly rather than sitting.
- The date variationA cup of chopped pitted dates works in place of the coconut. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour first so they do not sink and clump.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins, or 18 in small gem pans.
Dromedary was the brand name of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for packaged dates and shredded coconut, and its recipe booklets existed to find new uses for both. That commercial purpose explains why coconut turns up in a bran muffin at all: the booklet's job was to move the product into breakfast, not just into cake. The muffin itself sits at the meeting point of two early twentieth-century enthusiasms, the health-reform interest in wheat bran as roughage and the convenience of sweetened shredded coconut, which by then was sold in tins and cartons and no longer required cracking a nut. Sour milk as a leavening acid, paired with baking soda, was still ordinary practice in households where milk soured reliably on its own.