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Bran Muffins (Mrs Dorothy Boyd C boiling)
1/2 C sugar 1 T shortening 2 t salt 1 egg 2 C sour milk. Mrs. Dorothy Boyd. 1½ C boiling water ½ t soda, dissolved in boiling water 2 C Pillsbury's Health bran flour 2 C Pillsbury's flour Sweet milk may be used if 3 t baking powder are substituted for the soda. Makes about 2 doz. muffins. 3 eggs 1 t sugar 1 C milk Mrs. R. F. Wright.
The text as printed is scrambled — two contributors' entries appear to have collided on the page, and at least one quantity is clearly a typesetting error. Treat it as a sketch of a standard 1920s-30s bran muffin rather than a working formula.
- The water measureThe printed page gives 1½ cups boiling water, which is what our text now reads. With 1 cup of milk against 4 cups of dry ingredients, the batter will be soft but not pourable.
- Two recipes, one paragraphMrs. Boyd's name heads the entry and Mrs. Wright's closes it, with the note about sweet milk and baking powder sitting between the flours and the eggs. The eggs, sugar and milk at the end may belong to either version. There is no way to recover the intended division from the printed page.
- Pillsbury's Health BranA branded bran product of the period, no longer made. Two cups of unprocessed wheat bran is the nearest equivalent; the second two cups of "Pillsbury's flour" would be the company's plain all-purpose.
- Soda needs an acidSoda dissolved in boiling water only works here if the milk is sour or buttermilk — which the note about "sweet milk" and baking powder confirms was the assumption. With fresh milk, use the 3 teaspoons baking powder and leave the soda out.
- What is missingThere is no fat and effectively no sweetening (1 teaspoon of sugar for 24 muffins is not a sweetener). Many bran muffin recipes of the period include molasses or brown sugar and a few tablespoons of melted shortening. Their absence is consistent with the rest of the entry being incomplete.
- OvenThe original gives none. 400 to 425F for 20 to 25 minutes suits muffins of this size.
- YieldAbout two dozen, as stated, which may point to small gem-pan cups rather than modern muffin tins. Filled two-thirds in a standard modern tin, the batter will make fewer.
- If you want to bake itUse a current bran muffin recipe and read this one as a document. The gaps are in the printing, not in Mrs. Boyd's kitchen.
Church and club cook books of the 1920s and 30s are where branded ingredients entered home baking wholesale, and this entry is a clear case: the recipe does not call for bran, it calls for Pillsbury's Health Bran, on the assumption that every reader knew the box. Bran itself had become fashionable food rather than mill byproduct in those decades, promoted heavily on the strength of digestive claims, and millers were glad to sell the outer layers they had spent a generation sifting out. The double attribution — one name at the head, another at the foot — is also characteristic of these compilations, which are generally understood to have been produced locally by volunteers without a formal proofing stage. A collision like this one is part of what the books record: not polished cookery writing but the working notes of a congregation's kitchens.