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Raised Oatmeal Muffins
3/4 cup scalded milk 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm milk 1 cup cold cooked oatmeal 2 1/2 cups flour Add sugar and salt to scalded milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake. Work oatmeal into flour with tips of fingers, and add to first mixture; beat thoroughly, cover, and let rise over night. In morning, fill buttered iron gem pans two-thirds full, let rise on back of range that pan may gradually heat and mixture rise to fill pan. Bake in moderate oven twenty-five to thirty minutes.
An overnight yeast-raised muffin that uses up leftover porridge. The method is straightforward once you translate the yeast and the pans.
- Yeast quantityA yeast cake of the period was roughly 0.6 oz of compressed fresh yeast, so a quarter cake is a scant 1/2 teaspoon of instant or active dry yeast. That small amount is deliberate: the dough rises slowly overnight rather than in an hour.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Twenty-five to thirty minutes at that heat suits a standard 12-cup muffin tin.
- Iron gem pansGem pans were heavy cast-iron muffin trays, often with oval or oblong cups. A cast-iron muffin pan behaves closest to the original; a modern steel tin works but browns the sides less.
- Rising on the back of the rangeThe point is a gently warming pan, so the dough expands and the metal is already warm when it goes in the oven. A turned-off oven with the light on, or the top of a warm stove, does the same job. Judge by the batter reaching the rim rather than by a fixed time.
- Cooked oatmealCold cooked oatmeal means plain porridge from rolled or steel-cut oats, unsweetened and fairly stiff. A cup of loose, watery porridge will slacken the dough badly; drain or reduce it first if it is soupy.
- Working oatmeal into flourRubbing the cold oatmeal through the flour with the fingertips breaks the lumps so the porridge disperses instead of sitting as wet pockets in the crumb. Do this before adding any liquid.
- Scalded milkScalding was originally done to kill enzymes and organisms in raw milk. With pasteurised milk it is largely unnecessary for safety; warming the milk enough to dissolve the sugar and salt, then cooling to lukewarm, will serve.
- YieldExpect about 10 to 12 muffins. They are best the day they are baked and are good split and toasted the next morning.
Oatmeal muffins of this kind belong to the American thrift tradition of building a second breakfast out of the first one: yesterday's porridge, which would otherwise set hard in the pot, is worked into a yeast batter and turned into bread. Cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of such re-use recipes, and the overnight rise fits a household where the range was banked at night and lit again at dawn. The instruction to let the pans warm on the back of the range is a reminder that these books were written for solid-fuel cooking, where the stove offered a whole gradient of temperatures rather than one setting, and a cook learned to place a pan rather than dial a number. "Gem" was a common American term for a small bread or muffin baked in a heavy iron pan, and gem pans were a fixture of the period's kitchen equipment lists.