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Oatmeal Muffins
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1/4 cup lukewarm water 3 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 tablespoonfuls butter 1 cup hot milk 1 cup rolled oats 1/2 cup whole wheat flour 1/2 cup sifted white flour 1 teaspoonful salt Oatmeal muffins are rich in nutrition, hence make splendid "growing food". Boil the rolled oats and butter in milk one minute. Let stand until lukewarm. Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm water, and combine the two mixtures. Add flour and salt, and beat well. The batter should be thick enough to drop heavily from the spoon. Cover and let rise until light, about one hour, in a moderately warm place. Fill wellgreased muffin pans two-thirds full. Let rise about forty minutes, bake twenty-five minutes in a moderately hot oven.
This is really a porridge muffin: the oats are cooked in milk first and the cooled result is then leavened with yeast. It is the only recipe in this group where the order of operations carries a genuine risk.
- Let the porridge coolThe oats and butter are boiled in milk and must stand until lukewarm before they meet the yeast. Hot cereal kills yeast on contact, and this is the one step in the recipe with no margin in it. Lukewarm means it feels neither warm nor cool against the inside of the wrist.
- The yeast is dissolved separately, in waterUnlike almost every other recipe in the booklet, the yeast and sugar go into a quarter cup of lukewarm water on their own and the two mixtures are combined afterwards. Keep that separation. It is what protects the yeast from the hot milk.
- Rolled oats, old-fashionedNot instant and not steel-cut. A minute of boiling softens flattened oats and no more. Instant oats break down into paste in that minute and give a gummy muffin; steel-cut will still be hard.
- A moderately hot ovenThe booklet distinguishes this from its usual hot oven, so read it as about 375°F (190°C) for the twenty-five minutes given. The whole wheat flour and the oats take colour faster than white flour, and twenty-five minutes is long for a muffin.
- Thick enough to drop heavilyThat phrase, not the flour measurements, is the real instruction. Cooked oats absorb liquid as they sit, so judge the batter after the mixtures are combined and adjust with a spoonful of flour or milk.
The booklet calls oatmeal a “growing food”, and the phrase belongs to a period when child nutrition had become a selling argument attached to every kind of cereal product. It is advertising rather than measurement; nothing in the recipe supports it, and the booklet offers no evidence for it. What is genuinely old here is the method underneath. Cooking a cereal in milk and then leavening the result is the frugal way of turning porridge — often yesterday’s porridge — into something baked. Rolled oats made that easier, being a factory product that arrived already flattened and needed very little cooking, and this recipe treats them accordingly, asking for exactly one minute on the heat.