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Bran Nut Muffins
1½ cups bran. Katherine Hafemann. 1/3 cup sugar 1/2 cup chopped nuts 3/4 cup flour 3 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1 egg 1 cup milk 3 tablespoons melted butter Mix all dry ingredients and nuts, add beaten eggs and milk and lastly the melted butter. -400 degrees.
Mrs. Elizabeth Kohner. 1 C white flour 1 C bran flour
A church-supper muffin recipe recorded in shorthand, with the usual hazards of a typeset community cookbook: the bran itself never made it into the ingredient list, and a second contributor's version breaks off after two lines. Here is what to reconcile before mixing.
- The missing branThe title promises bran but the list gives only 3/4 cup flour. The fragment that follows, from Mrs. Kohner, runs one cup white flour to one cup bran; it appears to be the start of a separate contributor's recipe rather than the missing line from the first, but it is a fair guide. Adding roughly 1 cup of bran to the 3/4 cup flour is a reasonable reconstruction, and the liquid (1 cup milk plus egg and butter) suits about two cups of dry matter.
- Salt1½ teaspoons of salt in a batter this small is almost certainly a misprint for 1/2 teaspoon. Use 1/2 teaspoon.
- Bran flour"Bran flour" here means milled wheat bran, not a sweetened breakfast cereal. Unprocessed miller's bran is the closest match. All-Bran style cereal can be pressed into service, but it is sweetened and absorbs liquid differently, so cut the sugar back and expect a different crumb.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for two cups of dry ingredients is high by modern standards but not unreasonable for bran, which is heavy and resists rising; 2 to 2½ teaspoons gives a cleaner flavour with less metallic aftertaste.
- Oven and time400F is stated, which is right for muffins. No time is given: 18 to 22 minutes in a standard 12-cup tin, until a skewer comes out clean and the tops spring back.
- MixingThe order given — dry, then egg and milk, then melted butter — is correct, but stir only until the flour disappears. Bran batters are forgiving of moisture but not of overbeating, which produces tunnels and a tough crumb.
- RestingLetting the mixed batter stand 10 to 15 minutes before filling the tins lets the bran hydrate. It is not in the original and the muffins are better for it.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 standard muffins. Fill the cups two-thirds full; this batter rises modestly.
Community cookbooks of this kind were typically compiled by church or civic women's societies and sold to raise money for a building fund, a mission or a parsonage repair, with recipes submitted under the contributor's name — hence Katherine Hafemann and Mrs. Elizabeth Kohner side by side in print. The compressed, elliptical style is characteristic: contributors wrote down what a cook of their acquaintance would not already know, and left out the rest, which is how a bran muffin recipe comes to omit the bran. Bran itself moved from livestock feed and invalid diets to the respectable breakfast table over the later nineteenth century, pushed along by health reformers who preached the virtues of whole grain, and by the early twentieth century it was ordinary grocery stock. The nuts and cinnamon here mark this as a slightly dressed-up version.