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Plain Muffins
3 tablespoons sugar 3 tablespoons melted butter 2 eggs 1 cup sweet milk 2 cups Five Roses flour 3 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt.
Melt butter, add sugar and mix well.
Add eggs and beat. Add milk, sift in flour, salt and baking powder. Mix quickly to a smooth batter. Fill greased gem pans two-thirds full. Bake in a hot oven 20 to 25 minutes.
For cornmeal muffins, use 1 cup cornmeal and 1 cup Five Roses flour. For graham muffins, use 1 cup graham flour and 1 cup Five Roses flour.
For whole wheat muffins, use 1 cup whole wheat flour and 1 cup Five Roses flour.
For cocoanut muffins, add 1 cup shredded cocoanut.
A straightforward creaming-free muffin batter that depends almost entirely on how little you stir it. The variations at the end swap half the flour, which changes how the batter behaves.
- The hinge: mix quickly"Mix quickly to a smooth batter" signals speed, since the baking powder begins working as soon as the milk meets the flour. Note that the book asks for a smooth batter rather than the deliberately lumpy one modern muffin instructions call for; prolonged beating past smoothness will toughen the crumb.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; in period usage "hot" corresponds to roughly 400-425F. At that heat 20 to 25 minutes is plausible for a standard muffin cup; check early if your pan is dark metal.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans have smaller, deeper cups than a modern muffin tin. A standard 12-cup tin works; filling two-thirds full gives roughly 8 to 10 muffins.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk that would have called for soda instead of baking powder. Whole milk is closest.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour. Modern all-purpose substitutes directly; the 2 cups should be spooned and levelled, since scooping can pack in appreciably more flour than intended.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 2 cups of flour is on the generous side by current practice, likely reflecting older single-acting powders. Modern double-acting powder can be reduced somewhat if you find the flavour assertive.
- Graham and whole wheat variationsBoth absorb more liquid than white flour. Add 2 to 3 tablespoons more milk, or let the batter stand 10 minutes before filling the pans.
- Cornmeal variationFine or medium cornmeal is intended, not coarse polenta grind. The batter will be thicker and the muffins drier-crumbed; they are best eaten warm.
- CocoanutUse unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut; sweetened modern coconut will read as cloying against only 3 tablespoons of sugar.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and circulated in connection with sales of its flour, which explains why the brand name appears in the ingredient list of nearly every recipe. Muffins of this type belong to the North American "quick bread" tradition that expanded once commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century: a batter that could be mixed, panned and baked with no yeast and no waiting. Cast-iron gem pans were in use well before this book, and the words gem and muffin were used more or less interchangeably in Canadian and American household books of the period. The tail of variations, graham, whole wheat, cornmeal, coconut, is characteristic of milling-company cookbooks, which had an interest in showing that one base formula would carry the reader through a week of breakfasts.