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Bran Muffins
½ cup brown sugar 1 cup buttermilk or sour milk Butter size of an egg 1 teaspoon soda 1 cup Five Roses flour 2 cups bran (added last).
Bake in a square deep cake pan, and afterwards cut into squares.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in contributed-recipe books: ingredients, one line of method, no oven temperature. Here is what it leaves unsaid.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 1/4 cup. Soften it rather than melting it, and cream it with the brown sugar before anything else goes in.
- Order of workThe only method given is that the bran goes in last. Cream butter and sugar, beat in the buttermilk, stir in the flour sifted with the soda, then fold in the bran. None of this sequence is in the original.
- Bran means branUnprocessed wheat bran, the mill by-product, not bran breakfast cereal. Two cups of flaked cereal weighs far less and will give a dry, sandy crumb.
- Soda and sour milkThe teaspoon of soda is there to neutralise the acid in the buttermilk and provide all the lift. There is no baking powder and no egg, so get the pan into the oven promptly. If you have only sweet milk, sour a cup with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar.
- SaltNone is listed. If your butter is salted, that may account for it; if it is unsalted, add half a teaspoon.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature and no pan size. A moderate oven, in the region of 350-375F, and a greased deep square pan; a skewer should come out clean and the edges should pull slightly from the sides. Timing will vary with the pan, roughly 25 to 35 minutes.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour, closer to modern all-purpose than to cake flour. Standard all-purpose is the right substitute; do not use bread flour, which will toughen a batter this lean.
- YieldThe pan size is not specified; in a deep 8-inch square pan this would cut into nine generous or sixteen small squares. Despite the title, these are not baked in muffin cups.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its Five Roses brand, and much of its content came from recipes sent in by Canadian users of the flour, which accounts for the telegraphic style here: a woman writing out a formula she already knows by heart does not bother to say cream the butter. Bran itself was a cheap by-product of roller milling, abundant wherever flour was made, and its appearance in a miller's cookbook is partly thrift and partly a nod to the early twentieth-century enthusiasm for coarse fibre in the diet.