Corn Muffins
1/4 cup butter 4 teaspoons baking powder teaspoon salt 2 eggs Cream butter; add sugar, yolks well beaten, flour mixed and sifted with corn meal, baking powder and salt, milk and beaten whites. Bake in buttered muffin tins twentyfive minutes in hot oven. A very good muffin may be made by using only two tablespoons butter and one egg.
Entire Wheat or Graham Muffins 1 cup entire wheat or graham flour teaspoon salt 1 cup white flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons sugar, or 1 egg 2 tablespoons molasses 14 cups milk 4 tablespoons melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients, and combine in order given. Bake in hot muffin pans twenty to twenty-five minutes. 1 cup rye flour 1 cup white flour 1 teaspoon salt
A standard creamed-butter muffin batter of the early 1900s, leavened entirely with baking powder. The method is sound; the proportions in the ingredient column are what need attention.
- Hot oven"Hot oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F; no exact figure can be recovered. Corn muffins want the upper end so they set and rise quickly rather than spreading.
- Corn mealCorn meal of this period was often finer than today's coarse polenta grind, though it varied by region and mill. Coarse meal will read as gritty in a 25-minute muffin unless you scald it in the milk first and let it stand.
- Beaten whitesThe whites are folded in last and are doing real work here alongside the baking powder. Fold, do not stir, and get the pans into the oven promptly.
- Missing quantitiesThe ingredient list has lost the amounts for sugar, flour, corn meal and milk, and the salt is given without its fraction. A muffin of this type commonly runs about 1 cup flour to 1 cup corn meal, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 cup milk and 1/2 teaspoon salt, but the original figures cannot be recovered from the text as printed.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to about two cups of dry ingredients -- the ratio the entire wheat recipe gives outright -- is high by modern practice. Two to three teaspoons of fresh double-acting powder gives comparable lift with less aftertaste.
- The reduced-butter variantThe note about two tablespoons butter and one egg is an economy version of the same batter. With less fat the muffins stale faster and are best eaten warm.
- Pans and yieldGrease the tins well and heat them, as the second recipe specifies "hot muffin pans" — this sets the crust. With the amounts missing the yield can only be guessed at; a batter on this scale would fill roughly a dozen standard cups.
- Graham and entire wheatEntire wheat flour is whole-wheat; graham is a coarser whole-wheat grind. Either substitutes for the other. Whole-grain flours absorb more liquid, so expect a slacker batter than a white-flour one at the same measure.
Corn muffins sit at the point where American cornbread met the English muffin tin. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s, Lowney's among them, standardised a family of quick breads on a single template — creamed butter, sugar, eggs, milk, and a fixed dose of baking powder — then rang the changes with corn meal, graham, entire wheat or rye. That template is why the three recipes here run together so naturally: the technique is identical and only the meal changes. Lowney's was published by a chocolate manufacturer, and its bread chapter puts plain daily muffins alongside the confectionery the company actually sold.