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One Egg Muffins
1 1/2 cups Gold Medal flour 1 tablespoon sugar 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 egg 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon melted butter Measure, mix and sift the dry ingredients; add the milk, beaten egg and melted butter; beat vigorously. Half fill well greased muffin tins and bake in a hot oven from twenty to twenty-five minutes.
Corn Muffins, No. 1 1/2 cup corn meal 1 1/2 cups Gold Medal flour 1 cup milk 2 eggs 1 tablespoon butter 2 tablespoons sugar 4 teaspoons baking powder Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add the milk, beaten eggs and melted butter; beat vigorously. Half fill well greased muffin pans and bake in a hot oven twenty to twenty-five minutes.
Two plain quick-bread batters from the same template, one thinned with a single egg and one enriched with cornmeal. Both are mixed by the muffin method, and both suffer badly from the "beat vigorously" instruction as modern flour is milled.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures. "Hot" in cook books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-425F. Twenty to twenty-five minutes at 400F suits a standard 12-cup tin; smaller cups will be done closer to 15 minutes.
- Beat vigorously, with reservationsWith modern all-purpose flour, hard beating builds gluten and gives tough muffins with tunnels through the crumb. Stir only until the dry streaks disappear; a lumpy batter is correct.
- Half fill the tinsIn a modern shallow muffin tin, fill two-thirds to three-quarters full or the muffins will be squat.
- Baking powder quantityThree teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups flour is high by current practice, where 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup is standard. Some early twentieth-century tinned powders were weaker than today's double-acting product. Cutting to 2 teaspoons in the first recipe and 3 in the second avoids a soapy aftertaste.
- YieldThe one-egg batter makes about 9 muffins; the corn version, with more flour and two eggs, makes about 12.
- Corn mealUse fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind. If the meal is coarse, let the mixed batter stand 10 minutes so the grains hydrate before it goes into the tins.
- Greasing"well greased" meant butter or lard worked into every corner of the pan. Paper liners work, but the crust will be softer and paler at the sides than the recipe intends.
- Melted butterAdd it to the milk and egg rather than to the dry mix, and make sure the milk is not cold, or the butter will seize into flecks that never disperse.
Gold Medal, milled by Washburn-Crosby in Minneapolis, published cook books like this one chiefly to sell flour, and their bread and muffin sections read as demonstrations of what a bag of hard spring-wheat patent flour could do in an ordinary kitchen. The title "One Egg Muffins" is an economy claim: eggs were seasonal and dear, and "one egg" cakes and muffins were a standing category in American cook books from the 1890s through the Second World War. Chemical leavening had by then largely displaced yeast for quick breakfast breads, which is why both recipes here lean on a large charge of baking powder and no rising time at all. The numbering of "Corn Muffins, No. 1" suggests other versions of the same item elsewhere in the book, though the label alone is all this page gives us.