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Bran Muffins (C flour t soda salt Mix)
1/2 C sugar. 1 C sour milk. 1 egg. 1 C bran. 2/3 C flour 1 t soda salt Mix together sugar, bran, flour, salt and sour milk with soda, and the beaten egg. Bake in muffin tins about twenty minutes. Makes eight muffins.
Linna Corlett. 1 C flour 2 C bran 1 t salt
The ingredient list here has been scrambled in printing — flour appears twice, in two different amounts, and no quantity is given for sugar, sour milk or egg. Treat it as a sketch of a standard church-supper bran muffin and fill the gaps from proportion.
- The contradictory flourOne line reads "2/3 C flour," another "1 C flour." The 1 cup flour to 2 cups bran pairing is bran-heavy but workable; the "2/3 C flour" line may well be a fragment of a neighbouring recipe on the same page, though nothing in the text settles which figure was intended.
- Missing quantitiesSugar, sour milk and egg are named in the method but never measured. For 1 cup flour and 2 cups bran, a comparable period recipe would use about 1/2 cup sugar or molasses, 1 to 1 1/2 cups sour milk and one egg. The original gives no figures, so this is inference, not conversion.
- Soda and sour milkThe 1 teaspoon soda is there to react with the acid in the sour milk, not as a leavener on its own. Buttermilk is the direct modern substitute; ordinary milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice works, but sweet milk will leave the muffins flat and faintly soapy.
- Bran"Bran" in community cookbooks of this kind means loose wheat bran rather than a bran breakfast cereal. Unprocessed wheat bran from the baking aisle is the same thing.
- No fat listedThe recipe calls for none. The muffins will be dense and dry-crumbed by modern standards; a few tablespoons of melted butter or oil is the usual remedy, at the cost of authenticity.
- Let the batter standBran absorbs liquid slowly. Ten to fifteen minutes of rest after mixing softens it and prevents the gritty texture that makes old bran muffins seem coarse.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven term. In practice twenty minutes at around 400F suits eight standard muffins; test with a skewer.
- YieldEight muffins, as stated, meaning a standard twelve-cup tin will be two-thirds full.
Bran muffins spread in American home baking in the later nineteenth century, as roller milling made white flour cheap and bran an inexpensive by-product, and as health writers promoted "coarse" breads as a corrective to refined diets. Recipes like this one -- bran, sour milk, soda, one egg, no butter -- belong to the thrifty end of that trend: they use up sour milk and need no creaming or kneading. Community cookbooks of this type were typically assembled from contributions gathered locally, and the compiling and typesetting were rough enough that printed pages sometimes duplicate an ingredient line or drop a measurement. Linna Corlett's muffins survive with their method intact and their arithmetic in pieces.