Corn Muffins
3 eggs, beaten light. 1 pint of buttermilk (if very sour, use less). 1 teacup of cream or milk. 1 small teaspoonful of soda. Lard or butter size of an egg. Meal enough to make the batter of the consistency of pound. cake batter.--Mrs. I.
A soda-raised buttermilk cornbread batter with no fixed quantity of meal, which is the whole difficulty. Everything else is straightforward once you fix the measures.
- The hinge: batter consistencyPound cake batter is thick but still drops heavily from a spoon rather than pouring in a stream. Add the meal gradually and stop there; a stiffer batter bakes dry and crumbly, a looser one sinks in the pan.
- How much meal that isWith three eggs, a pint of buttermilk and a teacup of cream you have close to three cups of liquid, so expect to need somewhere around 3 to 4 cups of cornmeal. Mix, wait a minute for the meal to swell, then judge again before adding more.
- Teacup and "size of an egg"A teacup is generally reckoned at about 3/4 cup. Lard or butter the size of an egg is about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- Meal means white cornmealSouthern recipes of this period generally favour fine white water-ground cornmeal rather than the coarse yellow meal sold as polenta. Yellow meal works but will give a somewhat more assertive muffin.
- SaltThe original gives none. Add about 1 teaspoon, or the muffins will taste flat.
- Soda and buttermilkOne small teaspoon of soda is right for a pint of genuinely sour buttermilk; commercial cultured buttermilk is milder, so keep the soda at a level teaspoon and get the batter into the oven promptly, as the lift begins the moment they meet.
- Oven and pansBake at 425F for 18 to 22 minutes. Grease the muffin tin or cast-iron gem pan and heat it in the oven until the fat shimmers before filling; the hot pan is what gives the crisp shell these are made for.
- YieldAbout 12 to 15 standard muffins. Best served hot from the pan.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from Virginia housekeepers, many of them identified only by an initial, as here with "Mrs. I." The book devotes a good deal of space to cornmeal, which is unsurprising: in the Upper South cornbread in some form appeared at most meals, and a cook was expected to judge batter by feel, hence the instruction to work to the consistency of pound cake batter rather than to a stated quantity of meal. Commercial baking powders only became widely available in American kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, and recipes like this one, relying on sour milk and a pinch of soda, represent the older method that preceded them.