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Corn Muffins
3/4 C corn meal 1¼ C white flour 2 t baking powder ½ t salt Mix in order given. Bake in muffin pans. 3 t melted butter 1 egg 2 t sugar 1 to 14 C milk Gertie Wells. 2 C flour 1 C milk 1 egg 4 T shortening
A plain church-supper corn muffin, written in the compressed shorthand of a community cookbook: no oven temperature, no time, no yield. The proportions are workable once the fractions are read correctly.
- Reading the measuresC is cup, t is teaspoon, T is tablespoon. Several fractions have lost their slashes in this printing: the flour is 1/4 cup, the salt 1/2 teaspoon, and the milk 1 to 1 1/4 cups.
- The flour questionThree-quarters cup cornmeal to a quarter cup flour gives a very corn-forward, crumbly muffin. If you want something that holds together for buttering, go half and half; the batter will still taste of corn.
- OvenNothing is given. Corn muffins of this type want a hot oven, 400-425F, for 18-22 minutes, until the tops are set and springy and the edges have pulled slightly from the tin.
- Mix in order givenPresumably the dry ingredients first, then the melted butter, egg, sugar and milk as they are listed. Stop as soon as the flour disappears; muffin batters are best not overbeaten.
- Milk quantityThe range may well be deliberate. Coarser stone-ground meal generally takes up more liquid than modern fine degerminated meal; start at 1 cup and add the rest only if the batter will not pour thickly from the spoon.
- Rest the batterA short stand of five to ten minutes before filling the tins lets the meal hydrate and can give a less gritty crumb. This is a modern suggestion, not part of the recipe.
- YieldAs written this is a small batch: about 6 standard muffins, or 8 if the tins are shallow. Grease the cups well and fill them two-thirds full.
Recipes in books of this kind were, as a general practice, collected from contributors who wrote down only what a fellow cook would not already know. That is why there is no oven temperature here: in a household still cooking on a range with no thermometer, the heat was judged by hand and habit, not by number. Corn muffins themselves are the quick-bread descendant of much older American cornmeal breads, made possible by the chemical leavenings that became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century; baking powder turned a batter that once needed eggs, long beating, or a hearth-side spider pan into something a cook could stir up and have on the table in half an hour. The signature, Gertie Wells, is characteristic of the genre: such books tend to be a roster of their contributors as much as a set of instructions.