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Berry Muffins
Into a pint of flour in which have been sifted two teaspoons baking-powder and half-teaspoon salt, rub one-half cup butter or shortening, then add one cup milk, one tablespoon sugar and a beaten egg. When mixed well add one cup berries and bake in muffin tins twenty minutes in rather brisk oven.
A plain chemically leavened muffin from the era when a recipe assumed you knew the rest. A few of its measures and its oven need translating.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in a pint cup: 2 cups, roughly 8-9 oz of modern all-purpose. Spoon it into the cup rather than scooping, or the batter will come out dry and the muffins tough.
- "Rather brisk oven"Brisk means hot: 400-425F. Twenty minutes at 400F suits a standard 12-cup tin; test with a skewer at 18 minutes.
- Rubbing in the fatHalf a cup of butter rubbed into the flour is a pastry technique, not the melted-butter method most modern muffin recipes use. Work it to coarse crumbs with fingertips or a pastry blender and keep it cool, which is what gives these a short, tender crumb rather than a bready one.
- The hinge: mix as little as possible"When mixed well" is the one instruction to disobey. Add the milk and egg and stir only until no dry flour remains; further beating develops gluten and produces tunnels and peaked tops.
- Folding in the berriesAdd the cup of berries last with a few turns of the spoon. Tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour first keeps them suspended rather than sunk. Blueberries, raspberries or blackberries all work; frozen berries should go in unthawed, or they will bleed through the batter.
- SugarOne tablespoon is barely sweet by current taste; muffins of this sort were generally eaten as a bread with butter rather than as a cake. Two to four tablespoons brings them nearer what a modern eater expects without changing the structure.
- Tin and yieldMakes about 12 standard muffins. Grease the cups well or use liners; a modern light-coloured tin browns more slowly than the heavier pans often used at the time.
Muffins of this kind belong to the age of reliable baking powder, which reached American kitchens in commercial form in the second half of the nineteenth century and let cooks abandon yeast and long risings for a quick bread mixed and baked within the half hour. Berries spoil within a day or two of picking, and a household with a full basket needed ways to use them fast. The scant tablespoon of sugar may well be a marker of the period's palate; the muffin was, it is often said, a breakfast or supper bread eaten with butter rather than a sweetened cake, with the fruit presumably supplying what sweetness there was.