Togus Muffins
1 1/2 cups corn meal 1/2 cup Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup sweet milk 1 cup sour milk 1/4 cup molasses Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add the milk and molasses, beat thoroughly; pour in well greased muffin cups and steam for two hours.
This is steamed cornbread in individual portions rather than the usual loaf, and the steaming is the whole point — there is no baking powder and no oven here, so the batter sets by moist heat alone.
- Sweet milk and sour milk"Sweet milk" is plain whole milk; "sour milk" is naturally soured raw milk, best replaced with cultured buttermilk. The acid is what activates the soda, so do not substitute more sweet milk for the sour half or the muffins will be flat and taste faintly of soda.
- SodaOne teaspoon is a good deal of soda against a single cup of soured milk; the usual rule of thumb is nearer half a teaspoon per cup to neutralize the acid. Level the spoon rather than heaping it.
- Corn mealUse stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, medium grind. Modern degerminated fine meal absorbs less liquid and gives a slacker, sandier crumb; the batter should pour but not run like cream.
- MolassesUnsulphured dark molasses is the right register. Blackstrap is more bitter than the recipe intends, and treacle or sorghum will change the color and the flavor noticeably.
- How to steamFill greased cups no more than two-thirds, cover each with a square of greased foil or the whole pan tightly with foil, and set the pan on a rack in a covered roasting pan or large pot with an inch or two of simmering water. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- Two hoursThe full time is not unreasonable for a loaf, but individual muffin cups will almost certainly be done well before then; begin testing with a skewer at around 40 minutes rather than steaming the whole two hours, which risks a dense, gummy crumb.
- Beating"Beat thoroughly" is unusual advice for a quick bread, but with no leavening but soda and no dry heat to set a crust, the batter wants to be smooth and fully combined. It will not toughen the way a wheat batter would, since there is three times as much cornmeal as flour.
- Yield and servingAbout a dozen standard muffins. They come out pale, moist and pudding-like rather than crusty; serve hot with butter, or with baked beans, which is how this batter was eaten in New England.
Togus is a place in Kennebec County, Maine, site of the first national veterans' home, and "Togus bread" is recorded as a local name for the molasses-and-cornmeal steamed bread that elsewhere goes by Boston brown bread or, when made without rye, simply steamed corn bread. The family is old and thoroughly New England: cornmeal because it was the cheap native grain, molasses because it came north from the West Indies in quantity, and steaming because many kitchens had a kettle over the fire before they had a reliable oven. Turning the batter into muffin cups, as here, looks like a later refinement — a concession to speed and to the individual portion, and it also finds a place for a half cup of wheat flour in a dish that in some versions needed none. The Gold Medal book, like other millers' promotional cookery of the period, collects regional standbys and gives white flour a role in them.