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Bran Muffins (T salt t baking powder T sugar)
1 C white flour 1 C bran flour 1 t salt 3 t baking powder 3 T sugar Sift all together twice. Add one beaten egg and 2 tablespoons melted shortening, and about 3/4 cup of milk. (Batter should be quite thick.) Pour into greased muffin pans and bake for about 25 minutes in a 400° oven. Makes about eight large muffins.
A plain church-supper muffin, mixed by the standard dry-then-wet method and baked hot. The abbreviations are the chief obstacle for a modern reader.
- T and tCapital T is a tablespoon, lower-case t a teaspoon. So 3 t baking powder is 1 tablespoon, and 3 T sugar is 3 tablespoons, a tablespoon short of a quarter cup.
- Oven400F is hot enough to give the quick rise muffins need; no adjustment required. A convection oven should be dropped to about 375F.
- The hingeSift the dry ingredients twice, then stir the liquids in only until the flour disappears. Beating a muffin batter smooth develops gluten and produces tunnels and a tough crumb.
- Batter consistencyThe note that the batter should be quite thick is the real measure here. Bran absorbs liquid as it stands, so add the milk gradually and stop when the batter drops heavily from the spoon rather than pouring.
- Letting it restSome cooks let a bran batter stand a few minutes before baking to soften the bran and reduce grittiness; if you do, don't leave it sitting long.
- ShorteningIn a book of this vintage this means lard or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco; melted butter or a neutral oil works in the same quantity.
- Pans and yieldEight large muffins means eight cups of a standard twelve-cup tin, filled about two-thirds. The recipe calls for greased pans, so grease the cups well.
- DonenessTwenty-five minutes is the upper end for this size. Check at eighteen to twenty minutes and pull them when the tops spring back and a tester comes out clean, as bran muffins dry out quickly.
Bran arrived in American home baking as a by-product with a reputation. Roller milling in the late nineteenth century stripped bran and germ from white flour and left mills with a surplus, and the health-reform movement, along with the breakfast-cereal companies that grew out of it, promoted the discarded fraction as a corrective to the refined diet. By the 1920s and 1930s packaged bran cereal was a pantry staple and boxes carried muffin formulas on the side, which is roughly how recipes like this one entered community cookbooks. A church collection is exactly where such a recipe would settle: quick, cheap, made from a tin already in the cupboard, and easy to multiply for a Sunday breakfast or a supper.