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Fruit Muffins
Fruit muffins make a good variation as a hot bread. Beat thoroughly 2 eggs; add 1/2 cupful of milk, ½ teaspoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter and sufficient flour to make a thick drop batter. Beat hard for fully three minutes, then stir in 1 teaspoonful of sifted baking-powder and ½ of a cupful of sultanas, seeded raisins, dates, pitted and cut fine or shredded figs. Fill buttered muffin pans and bake half an hour in a quick oven.
By using various kinds of fruit as suggested and substituting all or part graham or whole wheat for the white flour the result will be a variety which will be sure to delight the family.
A plain drop-batter muffin stretched with dried fruit, written for cooks who measured flour by feel. Two numbers in the text are unreliable and need judgment.
- "Sufficient flour"With 2 eggs, 1/2 cup milk and 2 tablespoons butter, a thick drop batter lands at roughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups of flour — thick enough to fall from the spoon in a lump rather than pour. Add it in stages; whole wheat or graham absorbs more liquid than white and will need the lower end.
- The fruit measureThe printed page was checked and the fruit measure is half a cupful, as our text now gives. Half a cup of dried fruit suits this much batter; much beyond two-thirds and the muffins will not hold together.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon to nearly two cups of flour is light by modern standards, and this batter carries heavy fruit. Contemporary practice is closer to a teaspoon per cup of flour. Note also that it goes in last here, after the hard beating — modern practice is to sift it with the flour so it distributes evenly.
- A quick ovenGenerally taken as somewhere around 400 to 450F. At the upper end half an hour will overshoot for standard muffin cups; check at 15 to 18 minutes, or bake at 400F for 20 minutes. The long original timing may reflect the deeper, heavier iron gem pans of the period.
- Beating hard for three minutesThe three minutes here is beating the egg-milk-flour base before the leavening goes in, which is defensible; once the baking powder and fruit are added, stir only until combined, since overworked muffin batter turns tough and tunnelled.
- Sultanas and seeded raisinsSeeded raisins are raisins with the pips taken out, whether done at home or bought ready-seeded; any modern seedless raisin does the job. Toss dried fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding it in so it stays suspended.
- Graham flourCoarsely milled whole wheat, closer to today's stone-ground whole wheat than to fine white whole wheat. Substituting all of it makes a dense, dry muffin; half and half is the more reliable version of the suggestion.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 standard muffins. Best within an hour of baking — there is little sugar or fat here, and they stale quickly.
Muffins of this kind belong to the American "hot bread" tradition, in which a chemically leavened bread was mixed and baked while the meal was being laid, and eaten straight from the pan. Cheap baking powder made that possible on a weekday, and cookbooks of the period treat a hot bread at breakfast or supper as ordinary rather than special. The economy here is in the fruit: sultanas, dates and figs were dry-goods staples that kept well and carried enough sweetness of their own to let a cook use a single teaspoonful of sugar in the batter itself. Graham flour, named for the health reformer Sylvester Graham, appears in low-cost collections both because it was inexpensive and because it carried a reputation for wholesomeness. The instruction to vary the fruit and the flour is characteristic of thrift cookery, which sold one method rather than a dozen recipes.