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Rye Breakfast Muffins
1 cup rye meal 1 cup Gold Medal flour 1 cup milk 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 egg well beaten Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add milk slowly and the egg well beaten; beat all together, bake twenty minutes in muffin tins in quick oven.
A plain, fat-free breakfast muffin from a flour-miller's promotional cookbook. Two details need attention: what "rye meal" means and how hot a "quick oven" is.
- Quick ovenA hot oven, roughly 400 to 425F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits a standard muffin tin; smaller gem pans will be done nearer fifteen.
- Rye mealCoarsely ground whole rye, closer to a fine meal than to modern light rye flour. Whole-grain or dark rye flour is the nearest supermarket substitute; pumpernickel meal works and gives a coarser crumb.
- Gold Medal flourPlain all-purpose white flour. The brand name is there because Washburn-Crosby published the book.
- No fat in the batterThere is no butter or oil at all, which is unusual for a muffin and means these stale fast and stick readily. Grease the tins thoroughly or use paper liners, and eat them the morning they are baked.
- Batter consistencyOne cup of milk against two cups of dry ingredients gives a stiff, spoonable batter rather than a pourable one. Rye absorbs liquid unevenly, so let it stand two or three minutes and add a tablespoon or two more milk if it will not drop from the spoon.
- "Beat all together"Period muffin recipes routinely say beat; modern practice is to stir only until the dry streaks disappear. Rye has little gluten, so a brisk mix does less harm here than in a wheat muffin, but overworking still toughens them.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the generous side by current standards; two and a half teaspoons will lift these adequately and reduce the risk of a metallic aftertaste.
- YieldAbout eight to ten standard muffins. Fill the cups two-thirds full.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was issued by the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the milling firm that later became General Mills, and like most miller's cookbooks of the era it exists to put a brand name into a household's daily routine. That makes the presence of rye interesting: the book is selling wheat flour, yet here rye meal takes half the batter. Rye was a long-established American home grain, particularly in New England, where rye-and-cornmeal loaves were standard before cheap Midwestern wheat displaced them, and it lingered in breakfast breads and brown breads well into the twentieth century. Combining rye with white flour and chemical leavening, as this recipe does, is the transitional form: the older grain kept for flavor and thrift, the miller's product and the baking-powder tin doing the work.