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Cornmeal Muffins
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 2 tablespoonfuls light brown sugar 4 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 2 eggs well beaten 2 1/2 cups cornmeal 1 cup sifted white flour 1 teaspoonful salt Here's an excellent breakfast or supper dish, especially suited to cool weather.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm milk. Add lard or butter, cornmeal, flour, eggs and salt. Beat well. Fill wellgreased muffin pans two-thirds full. Set to rise in warm place, free from draught, until light--about one hour. Bake in hot oven twenty minutes. This recipe makes a dozen muffins. For over night, use one-fourth cake of yeast and an extra half teaspoonful salt. Cover and keep in cool place.
CORN BREAD: Use same recipe. Bake twenty minutes in well-greased, shallow pan.
Cornmeal raised with yeast rather than baking powder, mixed as a thick batter and left to rise in the tin. The method is short; most of what a modern cook needs is translation.
- One cake of yeastA cake of Fleischmann’s was fresh compressed yeast, sold perishable. The working equivalent is one 7g sachet of active dry yeast, roughly two and a quarter teaspoons. The overnight variation calls for a quarter cake, which is about half a teaspoon.
- Scald, then waitScalding was standard practice when milk came unpasteurized; with modern milk it is largely redundant. The second half of the instruction still matters. The milk must be lukewarm when the yeast goes in, not hot.
- Do not wait for doublingTwo and a half cups of cornmeal against one cup of flour leaves the yeast very little gluten to inflate. The batter lifts and domes but will not double. An hour, or the moment the pans look visibly swollen, is the signal to bake.
- “Hot oven”The booklet predates the household oven thermostat and names heat by feel. Hot means roughly 425°F here. Twenty minutes at that heat sets the tops and browns the edges before the crumb dries.
- The corn bread variantThe same batter goes into a shallow greased pan for the same twenty minutes, and it rises in that pan. Letting the batter prove in a bowl and then scraping it into the tin knocks out everything the hour bought.
- Lard or butterEither works and the choice is not neutral. Lard gives a shorter, more tender crumb and contributes no flavour of its own; butter browns the edges harder and reads sweeter against the brown sugar.
By the time this booklet appeared, a cook who wanted corn muffins for supper reached for baking powder and had them on the table within the hour. Printing a yeast version is a commercial argument as much as a culinary one: Fleischmann’s sold a perishable product that had to be bought fresh and used, and every dish the company could move back from chemical leavening to yeast was another purchase. The argument is not empty, either. An hour of fermentation does something to cornmeal that a chemical reaction cannot, taking the edge off the grain and leaving a faint sourness under the brown sugar. The overnight variation at the end — a quarter of the yeast, an extra pinch of salt, set somewhere cool — is the move this book makes over and over, and it names the household it was written for: one where somebody was up and in the kitchen before breakfast.