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Blueberry Muffins
2 C flour. 1 C milk. 1 egg. 4 T shortening. 3 T sugar 1 t salt 3 t baking powder 1 C fresh blueberries Sift dry ingredients, add milk, beaten egg, and melted shortening. Beat well and add berries which have been washed and dredged in a little of the fiour. Bake in muffin rings in moderate oven for 30 minutes. Mrs. Bert Steir.
The ingredient list has come through incomplete — the flour, milk, egg and shortening quantities are missing, though the method calls for all four. What survives is enough to place it in the standard early-twentieth-century muffin ratio, but the gaps are real and worth naming before you start.
- The missing quantitiesThe printed list gives only sugar, salt, baking powder and berries. A muffin batter of this type built on 3 teaspoons baking powder normally runs to about 2 cups flour, 1 cup milk, 1 egg and 2 to 3 tablespoons melted shortening; that is inference from the leavening, not from the page. Treat the original as incomplete rather than as a tested formula.
- T and tCapital T is tablespoon, lowercase t is teaspoon. Three tablespoons sugar is a lightly sweetened muffin by current standards — closer to a breakfast bread than a bakery muffin.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375°F in modern terms. Thirty minutes is at the long end for a standard muffin cup; check at 20 to 25 minutes, since ovens then held heat far less evenly than a single number suggests.
- Muffin ringsThese were plain metal bands set on a greased baking sheet or griddle, not the connected tin most kitchens have now. A standard 12-cup muffin pan does the same job; the batter should fill each cup about two-thirds.
- ShorteningIn church cookbooks of this period the word could mean lard, butter or, once it was available, hydrogenated vegetable fat. Melted butter gives good flavour here, though it carries more water than lard or vegetable shortening.
- Dredging the berriesTossing the washed blueberries in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them suspended rather than sunk. Drain them well first — wet berries and dry flour make a paste that streaks the crumb blue.
- Beat well, but not too wellWith modern bleached all-purpose flour, stir only until the dry streaks disappear; prolonged beating develops gluten and gives tough, peaked muffins with tunnels.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities above, about 12 standard muffins. Best eaten the day they are baked.
Blueberry muffins belong to the American quick-bread tradition that chemical leavening made possible: baking powder came into commercial production in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the time congregational cookbooks like this one were being compiled it had largely displaced yeast for breakfast breads. The result was a whole category of dishes -- muffins, gems, biscuits, corn breads -- that could be mixed and baked inside an hour. The attribution to Mrs. Bert Steir is typical of the form: these books were assembled from members' handwritten cards.