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Graham Muffins
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 4 tablespoonfuls molasses or brown sugar 3/4 cup chopped nuts 4 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 1 egg 1 1/2 cups Graham flour 1 cup sifted white flour 1 teaspoonful salt GRAHAM Muffins made the Fleischmann-way are unusually tasty and full of flavor. Once served, your family will insist on having them often. Dissolve yeast and sugar, or molasses, in lukewarm milk, add lard or butter and egg well-beaten, then the Graham and white flour, gradually, enough to make a batter that drops heavily from the spoon. If necessary add a little more of each, then the salt and nuts, beating all the while. Beat until perfectly smooth, cover and set to rise in warm place until light--about one and one-half hours. Have muffin pans well greased and fill about two-thirds full. Cover and let rise to top of pans--about half an hour, and bake twenty minutes in hot oven.
A batter muffin leavened with yeast rather than baking powder, which is the whole reason it takes two hours instead of twenty minutes. It is mixed like a quick bread and then treated like a dough.
- Graham flourCoarse wholemeal flour, milled from the entire grain without sifting the bran and germ back out. Stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing on a present-day shelf. Ordinary fine whole wheat flour works and gives a smoother, less interesting crumb.
- The milk measure is wrong as printedThe list reads “2 cup milk” against two and a half cups of flour, which would produce a pouring batter, not one that drops heavily from a spoon. Follow the description instead of the number: start with one cup of milk and add flour, or milk, until the batter falls off the spoon in a lump.
- There is no sugar apart from the molassesThe four tablespoons of molasses or brown sugar are the entire sweetening, and they are also what the yeast is started in. Dissolve them with the yeast in the lukewarm milk as the first step, exactly as written.
- Three-quarters of a cup of nutsThat is a great deal for this volume of batter, and it goes in at the end while the beating continues. Chop the nuts small; large pieces tear the structure as the batter rises and the muffins come out ragged.
- Yeast batters will not waitAn hour and a half in the bowl, half an hour in the tins. Once the batter reaches the top of the pans it has to go into the oven, around 400°F (200°C); left longer it falls and does not recover.
Graham flour carries the name of Sylvester Graham, the American preacher and dietary reformer who held that flour should be ground from the whole grain and never bolted, and who fastened that flour to an entire regimen of plain living. The regimen did not survive him. The flour did, and so did the name on the sack. By the time this booklet was printed, graham flour was a grocery item and nothing more, and the page sells it on taste alone — “unusually tasty and full of flavor” — with no trace left of the argument it came out of. The graham cracker travelled the same road.