Brown Muffins
1 cup corn meal 2 cups rye meal 1/4 cup molasses 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 yeast cake Dissolve the yeast cake in a little lukewarm water. Add enough more to make a soft dough. Let rise over night. In the morning add 1/4 teaspoon of soda dissolved in as little warm water as possible. Half fill well greased muffin pans, let stand until light, bake in a moderate oven. Rice Muffins, No. 1 1 cup boiled rice 1/2 tablespoon sugar 1 tablespoon melted butter 1 cup scalded milk 1/2 yeast cake 2 eggs Gold Medal flour Mix the first three ingredients thoroughly; when the milk is lukewarm dissolve the yeast in it and add to the rice mixture. Use flour enough to make a stiff dough. Rise until light, then add the eggs well beaten. Half fill well buttered muffin pans; raise until very light. Bake ten minutes in a hot oven.
Two overnight yeast-raised muffins from the same page: a rye-and-cornmeal batter leavened overnight, and a rice muffin built on scalded milk and boiled rice. Neither uses baking powder, so the timing of the rises matters more than anything else here.
- The hinge: let it get truly lightThese are yeast muffins, not quick breads. Once the pans are half filled, the batter must rise until visibly puffed and slack. The recipe gives no time; in a warm kitchen this is likely to be somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour. Under-risen pans will bake dense and heavy, and nothing in the oven will rescue them.
- Yeast cake conversionsCompressed yeast cakes of the period varied in size; the familiar small cake was about 0.6 oz, though larger cakes were also sold. On that basis a quarter cake is roughly 1/2 teaspoon of instant or active dry yeast, and half a cake about 1 teaspoon. Dissolve in liquid no warmer than 105F.
- The liquid is genuinely unspecifiedThe brown muffins call only for "enough more" water to make a soft dough, and give no quantity. Add it gradually until the mass is thick but pourable; the instruction to half fill the pans implies something closer to a stiff batter than a kneadable dough.
- Rye meal and corn mealRye meal is coarsely ground whole rye, not the light sifted rye flour sold for sandwich loaves — a medium or dark whole rye is the closest match. Corn meal here means plain stone-ground yellow or white meal, not a self-rising or degerminated mix.
- Why the soda in the morningAfter a night at room temperature the rye batter turns noticeably sour. The 1/4 teaspoon of soda neutralises that acid and gives a small lift; it is a corrective, not the leavening, so do not increase it or the muffins taste soapy.
- Oven temperaturesA "moderate oven" for the brown muffins is conventionally read as 350-375F; the recipe gives no baking time for them. The rice muffins want a "hot oven," 425-450F; the stated ten minutes is brief but plausible at that heat for a small pan — check that the centres are set rather than trusting the clock.
- Gold Medal flourRead it as ordinary all-purpose flour. For the rice muffins, a stiff dough will take roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups; add it in stages, since boiled rice varies a great deal in how much moisture it carries.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, and it will depend on how much liquid the brown muffin batter takes. Both are best eaten warm the day they are baked.
Rye and corn meal together are a long-standing New England combination, the "rye and Indian" of colonial kitchens, where wheat was scarce and expensive and the two cheaper meals were stretched with molasses and long, slow leavening. These brown muffins are close to a steamed brown bread batter sent to the oven in muffin pans instead of a pudding mould, and the overnight rise with a fragment of yeast cake is the older method that baking powder was steadily displacing by 1900. Gold Medal was the Washburn-Crosby mill's brand, ancestor of General Mills; the brown muffin formula is thrifty and wheatless, and uses none of the branded flour at all. The rice muffins on the same page use boiled rice as a soft, moist filler in a wheat dough, a common way of eking out flour and using up yesterday's supper.