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Blueberry Tea Cake
2 cups blueberries 4 cups Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup melted butter 2 eggs 2 cups milk Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add milk slowly, melted butter and eggs well beaten. Beat all together thoroughly, dredge blueberries with flour and fold into the batter. Fill greased gem pans three-quarters full and bake one-half hour in a moderate oven. Serve with stewed berries.--Miss Helen Campbell. Squash Muffins, No. 1 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup butter 1 1/2 cups sifted squash 1 1/2 cups scalded milk 1 yeast cake Gold Medal flour Cool the milk and dissolve in the yeast cake. Cream the butter, add the sugar and salt, beat together two minutes. Add squash. Dilute with the milk and dissolved yeast cake; mix stiff with flour (about five cups), knead well and let rise till light. Shape into biscuit, raise slowly. It will take half an hour longer than for plain rolls and they must not be too warm. Bake a half hour in a moderate oven.
Squash Muffins; No. 2 2 cups Gold Medal flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons sugar 1 cup sifted squash 1 cup milk 2 eggs Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add the milk slowly, beat in the squash and the eggs, well beaten. Bake like tea cakes.
Three quick-bread recipes run together on this page: a blueberry batter baked in muffin tins, and two takes on squash muffins, one raised with yeast and one with baking powder. A few of the terms need translating.
- Gem pansGem pans are cast-iron or tinned muffin pans; a standard 12-cup muffin tin is the nearest modern equivalent, though gem cups varied in size and shape. The recipe gives no yield; a batter this size will likely fill two tins, perhaps 20 to 24 muffins.
- A moderate ovenConventionally taken as roughly 350-375F. Half an hour at that temperature suits a three-quarters-full muffin cup; start checking early, since modern pans are thinner than the iron gem pans this was written for.
- Dredge the berriesThis is the hinge of the blueberry cake. Tossing the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding keeps it suspended rather than sunk, and folding rather than beating keeps the berries whole and the crumb from turning purple.
- Flour and hydrationGold Medal was milled from hard spring wheat; modern all-purpose is a close enough stand-in that no substitution is needed. Roughly 480 g will cover the 4 cups on one common convention, though period measuring practice varied and this recipe sifts; the batter should be thick enough to mound on a spoon.
- Yeast cakeIn Squash Muffins No. 1, one yeast cake is most likely a compressed fresh cake; such cakes were sold in more than one size, but the usual working equivalent is one packet, about 2 1/4 teaspoons, of active dry or instant yeast.
- Scalded milk must coolThe recipe says to cool the milk before dissolving the yeast, and it means it. Scalded milk sits around 180F; bring it down to roughly 100-110F, since hot milk will damage or kill the yeast.
- Sifted squashCooked winter squash, baked or steamed, then pressed through a sieve or ricer to remove strings. Drain it well; wet squash will throw the flour proportion off. Unsweetened canned pumpkin or squash puree works, though it is looser than home-cooked.
- The slow second riseThe squash and butter make a heavy, enriched dough, hence the instruction that shaped rolls take half an hour longer than plain ones and must not be kept too warm. A cool proof at room temperature gives better flavour and stops the fat from weeping out.
- "Bake like tea cakes"For Squash Muffins No. 2 this most likely points back to the tea cake above: greased muffin cups filled three-quarters full, a moderate oven, roughly 25 to 30 minutes. No yield is given; the batter should make about a dozen.
- ServingStewed berries means blueberries simmered briefly with sugar and a little water until they burst, served warm alongside rather than as a filling.
Cookbooks issued by flour millers were a standard piece of American promotion from the 1880s onward, and the Gold Medal books are among the best known of them; some recipes carry a contributor's name, which is why Miss Helen Campbell's tea cake sits next to two anonymous squash muffins. The blueberry cake belongs to the quick-bread tradition that chemical leavening made possible after baking powder became a reliable commercial product in the second half of the nineteenth century, while the yeast-raised squash muffin is the older method surviving alongside it on the same page. Squash in bread was thrift as much as flavour: winter squash kept in the cellar for months, and its moisture and sugar stretched flour and kept a roll soft for days.