Bran Muffins
Beat 1 egg until light, add 2 tablespoons molasses or sugar 1 cup milk 1 cup bran 1/2 cup Graham flour or entire wheat flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/2 cup seedless raisins. Mix well and bake in greased and floured muffin pans 20 minutes at 450 degrees F.
MAPLE CHARLOTTE WITH MAPLE PECAN SAUCE AND SPONGE CAKE
A plain, quickly mixed bran muffin from a 1920s luncheon menu. Two things need attention: the flour names and that oven setting.
- Soak the bran firstStir the bran into the milk with the egg and molasses and let it stand 10 minutes before adding the dry ingredients. Untreated wheat bran absorbs a great deal of liquid, and skipping the rest gives a gritty, dry crumb.
- Graham and "entire wheat" flourBoth are whole-wheat flour. Graham was traditionally coarser and stone-ground; ordinary supermarket whole-wheat flour works, and stone-ground gives the closer texture.
- Bran is not bran cerealThe recipe means unprocessed wheat bran, sold loose in the baking or bulk aisle. Substituting a sweetened bran flake cereal changes both the sugar and the liquid balance.
- 450F is hotter than needed450F is hot for small muffins -- Period quick-bread recipes often call for a very hot oven. In a calibrated modern oven, 400F for 20 to 22 minutes browns the tops without scorching the molasses; at 450F small muffins can darken badly before the centres set.
- The batter is meant to be looseOne cup of milk to half a cup of flour looks wrong by modern muffin standards, but the bran takes it up. Mix only until combined; overworking whole-wheat batter toughens it.
- Molasses or sugarMolasses gives a darker muffin with a faint bitterness; with sugar the muffins bake paler and taste plainer. The recipe treats the two as equal alternatives.
- YieldAbout 8 standard muffins, or 10 small ones. They are best warm the day they are made; bran muffins stale quickly.
- The stray line at the end"Maple Charlotte with Maple Pecan Sauce and Sponge Cake" is the heading of the next item on the page, not part of this recipe.
Bran muffins belong to the long American enthusiasm for coarse flour that began with Sylvester Graham's health preaching in the 1830s and was revived around 1900, when breakfast-cereal makers and domestic-science teachers alike promoted bran as a corrective to refined white bread. In books of luncheon and supper menus, the bran muffin tends to appear as the wholesome item beside richer dishes -- here the page runs straight on into a maple charlotte and sponge cake. Molasses, raisins and graham flour also made the muffin cheap and forgiving, which may be part of why it outlasted the fashion that produced it.