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Graham Muffins II
1 cup Graham or entire wheat flour 3/4 cup flour 1/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 egg 3 tablespoons melted butter 5 teaspoons baking powder Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk gradually, egg well beaten, and melted butter; bake in hot oven in buttered gem pans twenty-five minutes. Rye Muffins I Make as Graham Muffins II, substituting rye meal for Graham flour.
A straightforward quick bread that needs only a few translations: the pan, the oven word, and a leavening quantity that reflects the weaker baking powders of the period.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin, usually with shallow oval or round cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; the batter fills about 10 to 12 cups two-thirds full.
- "Hot oven"In books of this era a hot oven means roughly 400 to 425F. At 400F check at 20 minutes rather than waiting the full twenty-five, since modern ovens hold heat more evenly than a range oven did.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons for 1 3/4 cups of flour is far more than current practice, which runs about 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup. Period baking powders were less consistent and could lose strength in storage, though the generous proportions in books of this era may equally be house style. With fresh double-acting powder, 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons gives a good rise and avoids the metallic aftertaste and coarse crumb the full amount can produce.
- Graham and entire wheat flourBoth are whole-wheat flours, though the terms were not quite interchangeable: Graham flour was the whole kernel coarsely ground, while entire wheat flour was generally finer and sometimes had the coarsest bran sifted out. Ordinary whole wheat flour substitutes directly, though the crumb will be slightly finer. "Flour" unqualified means white wheat flour.
- MixingCombine only until the dry ingredients are moistened. The batter should look lumpy. Beating it smooth develops gluten and gives tough, tunnelled muffins.
- Rye variationRye meal is coarsely ground whole rye, closer to a dark rye flour than to the light rye sold for bread.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 muffins. Best eaten the day they are baked; whole-grain muffins stale quickly.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached that coarsely ground, unbolted wheat was more wholesome than the white flour that commercial milling was making cheap. By the time cookbooks like this one were written, his name had detached from his moral campaign and simply meant whole wheat flour on a grocer's shelf. Muffins of this type belong to the chemically leavened quick breads that reshaped American baking in the second half of the nineteenth century: with reliable canned baking powder, a household could put hot bread on the table in half an hour rather than managing a yeast sponge overnight. The numbering of the recipe, and the rye variation tacked to its end, reflect the habit of these books of grouping every permutation of a single batter formula together so a cook could work through them by substitution.