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Date Muffins
Mrs. Bert Steir. ½ C butter 14 C sugar 1 egg 12 t salt 3/4 C milk 2 C flour 2 t baking powder 1/2 lb. dates cut into small pieces Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and beat well. Sift flour, salt and baking powder together and add alternately with milk. Lastly stir in dates.
Mrs. Nellie Kimball.
A creamed-butter muffin, richer and more cake-like than the quick stir-together type, with dates as the only flavouring. The method is complete but the fat, sugar and salt figures as printed do not read cleanly, and no oven heat or baking time is given at all.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe butter, sugar and salt amounts as printed are not usable: 1½ cups butter against 2 cups flour is far too much fat, "14 C sugar" and "12 t salt" are clearly missing their fraction marks. A batter of this build normally runs to about a quarter cup of butter, half to two-thirds cup sugar and half a teaspoon salt, but that is a reconstruction, not what the page says.
- Oven and timingNo heat or time is given anywhere in the recipe. A modern baker would need to supply both; something in the region of 400F for 20 to 25 minutes suits muffins of this size, judging by a skewer in the centre coming out clean and the tops springing back.
- Creaming, not stirringUnlike a plain muffin batter, this one is creamed like a cake, so beat the butter and sugar until genuinely pale before the egg goes in. Once the flour starts alternating with the milk, mix only until it disappears; the usual muffin penalty for overworking still applies.
- Alternating dry and wetAdd flour first and flour last, in three additions of dry to two of milk. This keeps the batter from splitting when the cold milk hits the creamed butter.
- The datesHalf a pound is about 1½ cups once chopped. Dates of the period were often sold pressed into blocks and may have been drier than modern pitted dates. Toss the pieces in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in or they will clump and sink.
- Pan and yieldFills a standard 12-cup muffin tin about two-thirds full. Grease well or use liners; the sugar in the dates catches on the pan edges.
Compiled community cookbooks are full of date breads and date muffins. Dates were widely available in American groceries in this period, largely as imports from North Africa and the Persian Gulf; California's Coachella Valley plantings date from the same era but did not become a significant commercial source until later. They were often sold pressed into blocks, and offered an inexpensive way to sweeten a plain flour-and-milk batter. The double attribution on this entry -- a contributor's name at each end -- is a pattern seen in compiled community cookbooks, where recipes passed between neighbours.