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Baking-Powder Breads: Muffins
Ground-Rice Muffins. ar. 4 cupfuls ground rice, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 teaspoonful sugar, Dash salt, 3 eggs, 1 tablespoonful Calumet baking powder.
Cream together the butter and sug- Pour on enough boiling water to moisten the rice, stirring all the time.
Cool and add the yolks of the eggs, well beaten, creamed butter and sugar; then enough sweet milk to form a batter, beating thoroughly; add the baking powder and salt, and, last, fold in the whites of the eggs, well beaten. Bake in gem pans in a quick oven.
Twin-Mountain Muffins. cupful butter, + cupful sugar, 1 egg, cupful milk, cupfuls flour, 8 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder.
Cream the butter; add the sugar and egg, well beaten; sift baking powder with flour, and add to the first mixture, alternating with milk.
Bake in buttered gem pans twentyfive minutes.
Rye Gems. 1½ cupfuls rye flour, 1½ cupfuls white flour, 4 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder. 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 eggs, 1 cupful molasses, 11 cupfuls milk, 3 tablespoonfuls melted butter.
Sift the dry ingredients, add molasses, milk, eggs, well beaten, and C b a Oval Muffin Pans; b, Oblong Muffin Pans:
C. Round Popover Pans. butter. Bake in hot oven in buttered gem pan twenty-five minutes.
Nut Biscuits. 2 cupfuls flour, teaspoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 cupful chopped nuts, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, cupful milk.
Sift together the flour, salt, and Laking powder; rub in the butter, add the nuts-English walnuts, hickory nuts, or almonds-and sugar; mix to a soft dough with milk. Mold with the hands into small balls, place well apart on greased pans, brush each with milk, put a pinch of MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK chopped nuts on top, and bake in a hot oven.
Corn Muffins. 2 cupfuls cornmeal, 2 cupfuls flour, 1 tablespoonful sugar, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 1 tablespoonful butter or lard, 2 eggs, 2 cupfuls milk.
Sift together cornmeal, flour, sugar, salt, and powder; rub in the shortening, add eggs, beaten, and milk; mix into batter of consistency of cup cake; fill muffin pans, well greased, two thirds full. Bake in a hot oven.
Berry Muffins. 2 cupfuls flour, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter, cupful sugar, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 1 egg, 1 cupful milk, 1 cupful berries.
Mix as for plain muffins; add berries last, dusting them with a little flour. Bake in muffin pans in a hot oven.
Graham Muffins. 1 quart Graham flour, 1 tablespoonful brown sugar, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 1 egg, 2 cupfuls milk.
Sift together Graham flour, sugar, salt, and powder; add beaten egg and milk; mix into batter. Bake in a hot oven fifteen minutes in greased muffin pans.
Slappers. 2 cupfuls Indian cornmeal, 1 teaspoonful salt, tablespoonfuls butter, 3 eggs, 1 cupful milk, 1 cupful wheat flour, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder.
Mix together meal, salt, and butter; pour on slowly sufficient boiling water to thoroughly moisten the meal. Cover; let stand over night.
Add the eggs, well beaten, milk, flour -the first half-cupful of flour being mixed with the baking powder-to make a very thick drop batter. Drop by spoonfuls on a hot greased griddle, cook slowly till brown, turn and brown on other side.
No-Egg Wheat Cakes. 3 cupfuls flour, 3 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, teaspoonful salt, 2 cupfuls milk.
Sift dry ingredients; add milk to make a soft batter, and beat hard.
Bake immediately on hot griddle.
Serve with butter and maple sirup.
Jam Griddle Cakes. 3 cupfuls flour, 4 tablespoonfuls sugar, teaspoonful salt, 1½ teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 eggs, 2 cupfuls milk.
Rub butter and sugar to a cream; add yolks of eggs, one at a time.
Sift flour, salt, and powder together; add to butter with milk and whites of eggs whipped to dry froth; mix to a batter. Bake in small cakes; as fast as browned, lay each cake on a plate and spread raspberry jam over it, then bake more, lay on other already done; repeat this until you have used jam twice, then bake another batch.
A cluster of baking-powder quick breads from the era when chemical leavening was still a selling point, printed with a brand name in every ingredient list. Several of the quantities have lost their fractions in this printing, so read the ratios rather than the numerals.
- Oven heatA "quick" or "hot" oven for muffins and gems is usually read as roughly 400–450F; the fifteen-minute bake given for the Graham muffins assumes something in that range, and at 350F they will be pale and heavy.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin, often with oval or oblong cups; the illustration on this page shows oval and oblong muffin pans alongside round popover pans. Any standard 12-cup muffin tin works, but grease it well.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a double-acting phosphate powder and the brand is still on the market. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure. Most of the doses here work out to between half a teaspoon and one and a third teaspoons per cup of flour, which is in line with current practice; only the twin-mountain figure is out of range, and that looks like a printing error.
- Missing fractionsSeveral amounts have dropped their fractions in the original printing — the butter, sugar, flour and milk in the twin-mountain muffins, the salt in the nut biscuits and jam cakes, the butter in the slappers, and the milk in the rye gems. Treat them as ambiguous and work from a standard muffin ratio: roughly 2 cups flour to 1 cup milk, 1 egg, 1/4 cup each butter and sugar. The eight teaspoons of baking powder given for the twin-mountain muffins is far outside normal range and is most likely a misprint for three.
- Ground rice and Indian mealGround rice is rice flour, coarser than the modern superfine grind but interchangeable. Indian cornmeal simply means cornmeal; the scalding step in both the rice muffins and the slappers softens the starch, and skipping it leaves the crumb gritty.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour with the bran returned. A quart of it is about 4 cups by volume, roughly 16 oz. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; the batter will be slack and should be baked at once.
- Slappers rest overnightThe overnight soak is the point of the recipe, not an optional convenience — it hydrates the coarse meal fully. Refrigerating it rather than leaving it on the counter does no harm; the eggs, milk and leavening go in only in the morning.
Household Discoveries — the running head on the page reads MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK, the two titles being parts of one combined volume — belongs to the era when baking powder had displaced saleratus and sour milk in the American kitchen, and its recipe pages doubled as advertising: Calumet, founded in Chicago in the 1880s, is named in every list here, which may suggest the pages were supplied or sponsored rather than written from scratch. The muffins themselves are a survey of regional grain habits — cornmeal, rye, Graham, ground rice — from a period when wheat flour was not the automatic default and households kept several meals in the pantry. Twin-Mountain muffins are a New England name of uncertain origin, sometimes linked by folk tradition to the White Mountain resort hotels of New Hampshire, and appear in Boston cooking-school books of the 1890s. "Slappers" is an older regional term for a thick drop batter, said by folk explanation to be slapped onto a griddle, a first cousin to the hoecake and the johnnycake, here modernised with baking powder and an egg.