Soda Muffins
1 quart of flour. 2 eggs. 3 teaspoonfuls of cream of tartar. 1 teaspoonful of soda. Add enough buttermilk to make a stiff batter, and bake immediately.
A bare-bones quick bread of the sort a Virginia cook would have turned out for breakfast in a few minutes. The recipe assumes knowledge the modern reader has to supply: a hot oven, a greased iron pan, salt, and some fat.
- Mix and bake without pausingThe instruction to "bake immediately" is the hinge. Soda meeting buttermilk and cream of tartar begins releasing gas at once, and a batter left sitting on the counter goes flat. Have the pan greased and the oven already hot before the buttermilk goes in.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb of soft Southern flour. Modern all-purpose flour is stronger; a light hand mixing and a slightly slacker batter will keep the crumb tender.
- Leavening is doubledLeavening is generous -- Three teaspoons cream of tartar to one of soda is essentially homemade baking powder, and the buttermilk supplies a second acid. That is more cream of tartar than the usual two-to-one proportion, so some sourness will carry through. Baking powder with a little soda to account for the buttermilk can be substituted, but the exchange is not exact and will give a tamer rise than the original.
- What is missingNo salt and no fat are listed, a common omission in recipes written this telegraphically. About a teaspoon of salt and 2 to 3 tablespoons of melted butter or lard will improve the flavour and help the crumb keep.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. A hot oven, roughly 425 to 450F, suits a chemically leavened batter: high initial heat sets the crumb before the gas escapes, while a moderate oven tends to give heavy, pale muffins.
- The pan"Muffin" in this period more often meant a shallow round baked in iron gem pans or muffin rings than the tall domed shape of today. A cast-iron gem pan preheated and greased comes closest. A standard modern muffin tin works; grease it well and fill the cups two-thirds.
- Yield and timingA quart of flour makes a large batch, nearer two dozen standard muffins than one dozen. Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until well browned and firm on top. Serve hot; they stale quickly.
- ButtermilkCultured buttermilk from the dairy case is thicker and milder than the churned buttermilk of the 1870s but works. Expect to need roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups to reach a stiff, spoonable batter.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of recipes written in this telegraphic style — a list of proportions and one line of direction, because the reader was assumed to have made the thing a hundred times. Soda muffins belong to the great family of Southern buttermilk quick breads that followed the spread of cheap saleratus and cream of tartar in the mid-nineteenth century: before that, a breakfast bread generally needed either yeast and hours of waiting or beaten eggs for lift. The pairing of soda with cream of tartar is essentially baking powder assembled in the mixing bowl, a habit that persisted in household books for decades after commercial baking powders came on the market.<Sep />Note too the assumption of buttermilk on hand: in a household that churned its own butter, the byproduct was a daily fact, and Southern quick-bread cookery grew up around using it.</Sep>