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Bran Muffins (T soda C sour milk C molasses)
1 C flour 2 C bran 1 t salt 1 t soda 14 C sour milk 1/2 C molasses Mix dry ingredients. Add liquids and stir well. Bake in one dozen muffin tins. Chopped raisins, dates or prunes may be added if desired.
A church-supper muffin reduced to its bare bones, and the typesetting has lost a little along the way. Read the ingredient list carefully before you start, because the printed version does not quite add up to a batter.
- The garbled measurement"14 C sour milk" is a typesetting casualty; the likeliest readings are 1/4 cup or 1 1/4 cups, and given the quantity of bran and molasses the larger figure makes the better batter. Fourteen cups of milk against 1 1/2 cups of bran would be soup.
- Something is missingAs printed there is no flour, no fat, no salt and no egg, though the instruction to "mix dry ingredients" implies more than bran and soda. Bran muffin recipes of this general type usually add flour, a little melted shortening and salt alongside the bran. Treat the page as an outline rather than a complete formula.
- Sour milkMilk that has soured or clabbered, either naturally or with a little vinegar or lemon juice added. Buttermilk is the direct modern stand-in, cup for cup.
- Soda and acidThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the sour milk and the molasses, both acidic. That is the whole leavening system, so the batter should go into the tins and into the oven immediately after the liquids are stirred in.
- BranPlain wheat bran from the baking aisle, not a bran breakfast cereal, which is sweetened and already partly baked. Letting the bran sit in the milk for ten minutes before mixing softens it and keeps the crumb from being gritty.
- MolassesUse unsulphured baking molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral-tasting than the everyday cooking molasses this recipe assumes.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Muffins of this type bake at 400F for 18 to 22 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the tops spring back.
- YieldOne dozen standard muffins, as stated. Fill the cups about two-thirds; a bran batter rises modestly and will not dome much.
Bran muffins belong to the era when milled wheat bran, once sold mainly as animal feed, was being repositioned as a health food for human digestion — a shift pushed by breakfast-cereal manufacturers in the 1910s and 1920s and taken up by home bakers who liked the dark, molasses-sweetened result. The pairing of soda with sour milk is older still, a farm-kitchen habit from the years before baking powder was cheap and reliable: sour milk was a by-product every household with a milk cow had to use up, and a teaspoon of soda turned it into leavening. Recipes contributed to community cookbooks were often set down in shorthand by cooks who had made the thing many times and saw no need to spell out the flour or the oven — which is one reason so many of them arrive incomplete.