Cream Muffins
2 cups Gold Medal flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons baking powder 2 eggs 1 1/4 cups cream Mix and sift the dry ingredients four times. Beat the yolks and add with the cream to the flour slowly. Beat the whites very light and fold into the batter. Bake in well greased muffin pans. Serve hot.
A plain quick bread with no sugar and no added fat beyond what is in the cream. The original omits oven temperature and time, as most books of this vintage did, assuming the cook knew her range.
- Oven and timeBake at 425F for 18-22 minutes, until risen and lightly browned. Muffins leavened partly by beaten egg white want a hot oven so they set before the air escapes.
- What "cream" meant'Cream' in books of this period covered a range of grades, and ordinary cream was often thinner than today's heavy cream, nearer light cream or half-and-half. Modern heavy cream at 36 percent will give a heavier, greasier crumb; thin it with milk or use half-and-half.
- Sifting four timesThis was a real technique with the coarse, variable flour of the period: it aerated the flour and distributed the baking powder evenly. With modern all-purpose flour, one sift or a thorough whisking of the dry ingredients does the same job.
- The flourGold Medal was and is a general-purpose wheat flour. Use plain all-purpose, measured by spooning into the cup and levelling, or about 250 g for the two cups.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirAll the lightness here comes from the beaten whites and the baking powder. Fold the whites in with a few decisive strokes, leaving a slightly streaky batter, and get the pans into the oven at once.
- No sugarThese are not sweet muffins. They are meant as a hot bread with butter and preserves alongside a meal, and they will taste flat if you expect a modern breakfast muffin.
- Pans and yield"Well greased" is worth taking literally with a low-fat batter; butter the cups or use paper liners. The batter fills about 12 standard muffin cups two-thirds full.
- Serve hotNot decoration. With no sugar and little fat, these stale quickly and are dull within an hour of leaving the oven.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was one of the milling industry's promotional cookbooks, issued by Washburn-Crosby (the company that later became General Mills) to put its brand name into American kitchens by putting it into recipes. The bread section is heavy with quick breads because chemical leavening had, by the turn of the twentieth century, made a hot bread at every meal an achievable ambition rather than a day's work; baking powder muffins, gems and biscuits took minutes to mix. "Muffin" here means the American baking-powder cup cake baked in a pan, rather than the yeasted, griddle-baked English muffin.