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Oatmeal Muffins
1 cup scalded milk teaspoon salt 1 cup cold cooked oatmeal yeast cake 1/4 cup sugar or 4 cup lukewarm water + cup molasses 2 to 3 cups flour Mix oatmeal, scalded milk, sugar and salt. When lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake. Add flour to make a stiff batter; beat five minutes. Let rise over night. Beat and fill buttered gem pans, one half full; let rise; and bake in moderate oven one half hour.
An overnight yeast-raised muffin batter, closer to a soft bread dough than to the quick muffins most cooks expect. The oatmeal is leftover breakfast porridge, which is why the book assumes you already have a cup of it cold in the icebox.
- Gem pansCast-iron pans with individual cups, varying in the period between rounded, oval and straight-sided patterns, generally close to or a little smaller than a modern muffin cup. A 12-cup tin will do; butter it generously, as this batter sticks.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Half an hour at that heat suits the deep cups; the muffins are done when they sound hollow and a skewer comes out clean.
- Yeast cakeYeast cakes of the period were not standardised in size; taking it as roughly the modern 0.6 oz fresh cake gives about 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast. Because the batter rises overnight at room temperature, less than that is safer against over-fermenting and a sour, boozy flavour.
- Scalded milkScalding raw milk was standard practice, usually explained at the time as a matter of safety and keeping quality; it is also said to inactivate components that weaken gluten. Pasteurised milk needs no scalding, but heating it does help soften the oatmeal, so warm it and then cool to lukewarm before the yeast goes in.
- Cold cooked oatmealUse plain porridge made from rolled or steel-cut oats, cooked thick and chilled. Flavoured instant oatmeal packets are sweetened and the instant flakes go gummy, which will throw the sugar and moisture out of balance.
- The stiff batterAim for a batter you can beat with a spoon but that will not pour freely -- somewhere between muffin batter and bread dough. The five minutes of beating develops gluten and is what gives these their chew; do not shorten it.
- Overnight riseIn a modern kitchen at 70F or above, an overnight rise will likely overshoot. Cover and refrigerate instead, then bring the batter back to room temperature, beat it down, and pan it.
- SweeteningThe ingredient line appears to offer sugar or molasses as alternatives rather than both. Molasses gives a darker, faintly bitter flavour; sugar gives a plainer muffin.
- YieldRoughly 12 muffins from the smaller flour quantity. Fill the cups only half full, as directed -- the second rise plus oven spring will take them to the rim.
Oatmeal muffins of this kind belong to a long New England habit of making the next day's bread out of the previous day's porridge: the same thrift produced oatmeal bread, rye and Indian bread, and the many recipes beginning "one cup cold cooked cereal." The overnight yeast batter marks the recipe as older in style than the baking-powder muffins alongside it, a holdover from the days when a household kept its own yeast alive and planned baking around it. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its chocolate confections it carries a full complement of ordinary household recipes.