Graham Muffins
1 cup graham flour 1 cup Gold Medal flour 1/4 cup sugar 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 egg 1 tablespoon melted butter Mix and sift the dry ingredients; add gradually the milk, the egg well beaten and butter. Bake in hot buttered gem pans twenty-five minutes.
A plain half-graham muffin from a flour-company pamphlet, written for cooks who knew their own stove. Two things need translating: the pan and the missing oven temperature.
- Gem pansGem pans are muffin tins, often heavy cast iron though also made in tin, with the number and shape of cups varying by pattern. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; if you have cast iron, preheat it in the oven and brush with butter just before filling, which is most likely what "hot buttered" means.
- Oven temperatureNone is given because the book assumed it. Muffins of this type bake at 400-425F; at 25 minutes, lean toward 400F so the crumb sets before the tops darken.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, bran and germ included. Modern whole wheat flour is a fair substitute, though stone-ground is closer in texture. It absorbs liquid slowly, so the batter thickens on standing.
- Gold Medal flourSimply all-purpose white flour. The brand name is house advertising, not a specialty product.
- MixingSift the dry ingredients together, then add the wet and stir only until the dry flour disappears. A lumpy batter is correct; beating it smooth develops gluten and gives tough, tunnelled muffins.
- Batter consistencyOne cup of milk to two cups of flour gives a thick, spoonable batter rather than a pourable one. Add a tablespoon or two more milk if the graham flour has left it stiff enough to hold a peak.
- YieldAbout a dozen small muffins, or fewer if filled to the size most people expect today. Best eaten warm the day they are baked, as whole wheat muffins with only a tablespoon of fat stale quickly.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who campaigned for coarse unsifted wheat meal against the fashionable white bread of the day; the flour, and the cracker, outlived his wider theories about diet and temperance. By the time this pamphlet appeared, graham flour was, by most accounts, an ordinary pantry staple, valued for flavor and "wholesomeness" in muffins, gems and quick breads. Here it is paired half-and-half with the company's white flour: Washburn-Crosby's Gold Medal booklets were promotional literature, distributed to put the brand name into a housewife's daily routine.