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Pauline Muffins
2 cups Gold Medal flour 1 tablespoons sugar 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups milk 1 tablespoon melted butter 2 eggs Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add the milk slowly, the eggs well beaten and the melted butter. Beat rapidly until very light. Fill gem pans two-thirds full and bake in a quick oven.
A thin, pourable batter rather than the stiff dough most people expect from a muffin — closer in behavior to a popover or a batter gem. Read the liquid ratio before you start.
- The liquid is not a misprint to correct casuallyTwo cups of milk to two cups of flour gives a batter you pour, not scoop. It bakes into a light, open, slightly hollow muffin with a crisp shell; if you want a conventional cakey crumb, that is a different recipe.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-425F, though period usage varied. The high heat is doing real work here: it flashes the liquid to steam and lifts the batter before the crumb sets.
- Gem pansHeavy cast-iron muffin pans, sold in a range of cup shapes and sizes, some smaller than a modern standard muffin cup. Grease them well; heating the empty pan before filling is usual practice with gem pans, though this recipe does not say to.
- Beating rapidly until very lightThis is the hinge. Unlike a modern muffin batter, which you barely stir, this one wants air beaten into it, since the eggs and steam are carrying much of the rise.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for two cups of flour was ordinary when single-acting tartrate and phosphate powders were common. With modern double-acting powder, 2 teaspoons is plenty; either way, get the pans into the oven promptly.
- Time and donenessNo time is given: expect 20–25 minutes. They should be deep brown and firm to the touch. Pulling them early collapses the structure, as with popovers.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins. Best eaten within minutes of leaving the oven; the crisp shell softens quickly.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was a promotional volume from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, the firm that later became General Mills — one of the countless branded cookbooks American millers and grocers issued to attach their trademark to a housewife's daily baking. The "gem pans" the recipe assumes were a nineteenth-century American fixture: heavy cast-iron pans, sold in a range of cup shapes, for the quick chemically leavened breads that came to be called gems. Recipes carrying a woman's first name, as this one does, are often supposed to have arrived by something like the route familiar from church and club cookbook contributions — a name attached to a batter someone in particular was known for, with no further account of who she was — though a promotional miller's cookbook was not compiled in the same way as those collections, and how the name came to be attached here is not documented. The wetness of the batter places it on the border between muffin and popover, a boundary that early twentieth-century cookbooks policed much less strictly than modern ones do.