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Muffins
2 small T butter 1 egg 1 C milk Mrs. A. M. Casey.
As printed this is an ingredient list rather than a working recipe: the flour, leavening and salt are all missing, along with any method. Church cookbooks were set from handwritten slips, and lines dropped out in typesetting more often than anyone admitted. Read the notes below before deciding to attempt it.
- What is missingWith butter, one egg and one cup of milk there is no flour, no baking powder and no salt, so nothing here can be mixed as written. A contemporary muffin of this scale would take roughly two cups of flour and about two teaspoons of baking powder, but that is inference from other recipes in the same section, not from this one.
- "2 small T"T is tablespoon; "small" most likely indicates a level or scant measure rather than a heaped one, though the book does not define it. Two tablespoons of butter is about one ounce, a lean amount for the quantity of milk given.
- Muffin means gem panIn American cookbooks of this general period a muffin was commonly baked in cast-iron gem pans or muffin rings, usually greased and often heated before the batter went in. A cold modern nonstick tin will behave differently.
- OvenNo oven instruction survives in this entry. Quick-bread muffins were generally baked in a hot oven for roughly 20 to 25 minutes; a modern cook would be working from other recipes, not from this line.
- MixingMuffin batters of this type are stirred only until the dry ingredients are damp. Beating to smoothness develops gluten and produces tunnels and a tough crumb, which is the single thing most likely to go wrong even with a complete formula.
- YieldAssuming the reconstructed flour quantity, a batter based on one cup of milk and one egg would fill roughly ten to twelve standard muffin cups, or more small gems; with no flour figure on the page this is only an estimate.
- Better approachTreat this entry as a historical artifact and use a complete modern muffin recipe if you want breakfast. There is no way to recover Mrs. Casey's proportions from what survives on the page.
Community cookbooks like this one appear to have been compiled largely from recipes their contributors already cooked from memory, which may be why so many entries read as shopping reminders rather than instructions: the author of this line seems unlikely to have needed to be told how much flour a cup of milk takes, or that the gem pans go into a hot oven. American muffins of this period were a chemically leavened quick bread, distinct from the yeast-raised English muffin baked on a griddle, and they depended on the commercial baking powder that had become cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century. The names attached to each recipe were part of the presentation, and Mrs. A. M. Casey's signature would have carried its own associations for the original reader.