Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Oatmeal Muffins
Oatmeal Muffins
2 Coat meal 1 t salt ½ C sour milk 2 T shortening 1 egg 1 t soda ½ C sugar 1 C flour Mix together oat meal and sour milk. Let stand for two or three hours or over night. Stir in other ingredients and bake in muffin pans in a hot oven. 4 level T sugar
A church-supper muffin built on the old trick of soaking rolled oats in sour milk overnight. The typesetting in this entry is garbled in at least two places, so read the notes before you scale anything.
- "2 Coat meal""2 Coat meal" is almost certainly "2 C oat meal" — two cups of oatmeal — with the abbreviation run into the following word. Whether the compiler meant rolled oats or a coarser ground meal is not stated, though the two-to-three-hour soak suits rolled oats.
- The sugar is contradictoryThe ingredient list says 1½ cups and a stray line after the method says 4 level tablespoons. A cup and a half against one cup of flour is very high for a muffin, so the smaller figure is the safer reading — but there is no way to tell whether the 1½ C is a misprint or whether the trailing line has drifted in from a neighbouring entry.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk from the refrigerator — this meant raw milk gone naturally acidic. Cultured buttermilk is the standing substitute, or a cup and a half of milk with a tablespoon and a half of vinegar or lemon juice stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Soda, not powderThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the sour milk. If you use sweet milk the muffins will be flat and faintly soapy. Mix and pan the batter promptly once the soda goes in; the lift begins immediately.
- "A hot oven""A hot oven" in period usage is roughly 400-425F. Muffins want the initial blast to set a crust and force the crumb up; 20 to 25 minutes at that heat should do it for standard cups.
- The soak is not optionalTwo to three hours minimum, overnight better. Dry oats stirred straight into a thin batter stay tough and pull moisture out of the crumb as it bakes.
- ShorteningShortening at this date generally meant lard or a vegetable shortening; melted butter works and tastes better. Melt and cool it before adding so it does not cook the egg.
- YieldAbout a dozen standard muffins. Best the day they are baked — the oats make them dense and they stale quickly.
Cookbooks compiled from handwritten cards, printed cheaply, and proofread lightly are why an entry like this can carry two contradictory sugar measurements and a phantom ingredient called "coat meal." The recipe itself belongs to a large family of American sour-milk quick breads that flourished before commercial baking powder was universally trusted or affordable: soda plus whatever acid the household already had — sour milk, buttermilk left from churning, molasses — did the same work for less money. Rolled oats had become a cheap pantry staple in the Midwest by the late nineteenth century, milled in quantity in Ohio and Iowa and pushed hard by the breakfast-cereal trade, and cooks put them into everything from muffins to cookies to meatloaf. The overnight soak softens the oats before baking.