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Ham Muffins
2 C flour 1 C milk 2 t baking powder 1 egg 1 C minced (left over) ham Pinch salt Sift dry ingredients, add beaten egg and milk and lastly ham. Bake in quick oven 15 minutes. Must be eaten hot to be good.
A leftover-ham muffin from a church-supper collection, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew how muffins go. A few details need filling in.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-425F. At that heat 15 minutes should be about right for a standard muffin tin; test with a skewer at 13 minutes if your tin is dark metal.
- C and tC is a cup, t is a teaspoon. So 2 cups flour, 1 cup milk, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 cup minced ham.
- No fat at allThe recipe relies on the ham for richness, which is why the muffins are dry and dense once cooled. That is also why the original insists they be eaten hot. A tablespoon or two of melted butter or bacon fat in the wet mix is a period-plausible correction if you want them to keep past the meal.
- Baking powder strengthTwo teaspoons to two cups of flour is about the standard modern proportion. Mix only until the flour disappears and get the tins into the oven promptly.
- The hamMince it fine and dry it on a towel if it is wet from the platter. Modern deli ham is wetter and much saltier than a home-boiled ham; taste it first and skip the pinch of salt if it is heavily cured.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins, or 8 large. Grease the tins well; there is no fat in the batter to help them release.
Community cookbooks like this one are a valuable record of what ordinary American households actually ate. The tell here is the parenthetical "(left over)": the recipe exists because meat had to be used up, and a muffin was a respectable way to serve up the last cup of scraps. Baking powder, cheap and reliable, made this kind of fast quick bread possible without yeast or a long proof, and the genre of savory leftover muffins and gems flourished in exactly these pages. The closing line, "Must be eaten hot to be good," is the honest note of a cook who had tried them cold.