Home › Breads, Biscuits, Etc. › Corn-Meal Muffins
Corn-Meal Muffins
Mix together 1 pint of flour, 1 cupful of fine corn-meal and 1/2 of a teaspoonful of salt. Cream together 2 tablespoonfuls of butter and 1/2 of a cupful of sugar, add 2 well-beaten eggs, then, alternately, 1 cupful of milk and the dry ingredients. Lastly beat in 2 teaspoonfuls of bakingpowder and fill greased muffin pans two-thirds full. Bake in a quick oven.
A plain creamed-butter muffin batter, distinguished mainly by the order of operations: the leavening goes in at the very end. A few conversions and one timing figure are all it needs.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in this period, so a pint means 2 cups, not a pound. With the cup of corn-meal that gives a 2:1 flour-to-meal ratio — a soft, cakey muffin rather than a gritty Southern-style one.
- Fine corn-mealFine-grind yellow or white cornmeal, not the coarse stone-ground meal sold for polenta and not self-rising cornmeal, which would double the leavening. A fine degerminated supermarket cornmeal is a reasonable modern substitute.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F, the usual modern reading of the term; the book gives no temperature. Muffins of this size will take somewhere around 18-22 minutes, so test with a skewer from 18 minutes. The high heat helps give the domed top.
- Baking powder lastAdding the powder at the very end appears in period recipes, presumably to lose as little lift as possible before the pans went into the oven. Whisking it into the flour and meal at the start works at least as well now, and avoids the streaks of unmixed powder that the original method risks.
- Don't overwork the batterOnce the flour goes in, mix only until no dry patches remain. The creamed butter and sugar make this a forgiving batter, but continued beating still develops gluten and gives tunnels.
- Greasing the pansButter or shortening the cups and the top surface of the pan between them; these muffins rise and spread. Paper liners work but soften the crust the high oven is meant to produce.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins, filled two-thirds as directed. Best within a few hours of baking — cornmeal breads stale quickly.
Cornmeal muffins sit where American corn breads meet the muffin or gem tin, and this version leans toward the richer, cakier side: butter, sugar, eggs and twice as much wheat flour as meal. Recipes of this kind were printed often in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books, and cornmeal was generally cheaper than wheat flour, so stretching a pint of flour with a cup of meal saved something at a time when wheat prices moved with the harvest. The sugar and butter mark it as a table muffin for a family meal rather than the unsweetened, nearly fatless corn bread baked in a skillet in plainer kitchens. The instruction to beat in the baking powder last is a small period signature: books repeated such handling rules for chemical leavening long after improved formulations had made them unnecessary.