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Bran Muffins No. 2
2 cups bran 1 cup flour 1 teaspoon soda 1/2 cup butter 3 tablespoons molasses 1 1/2 cups sour milk 1 teaspoon salt Sift the dry ingredients, rub in the butter; add molasses and sour milk; put into hot muffin pans and bake in a hot oven about twenty minutes.
A plain quick bread that leans entirely on the soda-and-sour-milk reaction for lift, with no baking powder and no eggs. Get the batter into hot pans quickly and it works as written.
- "Hot oven" means 425F"Hot oven" means roughly 400-450F in period usage. For muffins with molasses in them, the lower end is safer; molasses browns fast and the tops can darken before twenty minutes is up.
- Sour milk is not spoiled milkIn period usage this meant raw milk naturally clabbered to a thick, tangy state. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, stir 1 1/2 tablespoons of lemon juice or white vinegar into 1 1/2 cups of whole milk and leave it ten minutes.
- Soda is saleratus, i.e. baking sodaSoda here means baking soda (bicarbonate); older books sometimes call a similar product saleratus. One teaspoon to 1 1/2 cups of acidic milk is a sensible ratio. There is no baking powder here, so the acid in the sour milk and molasses is the only thing activating it -- skip the acid and the muffins stay flat and taste soapy.
- Work fast once wet meets dryThe rise begins the moment the sour milk hits the soda. Mix, fill, and bake without pausing; batter left standing on the counter loses most of its lift.
- BranUse unprocessed wheat bran or miller's bran, not a bran breakfast cereal, which is already sweetened and partly cooked. Two cups of bran to one of flour makes a coarse, moist crumb rather than a fine one.
- Rubbing in the butterHalf a cup of cold butter rubbed into the dry mix by hand gives a slightly short, crumbly texture. Melted butter stirred in with the liquids works too and is faster, though the crumb comes out a little denser.
- Hot pansThe instruction to use hot muffin pans is deliberate; preheated tins set the outside of the muffin at once and help it climb. Cast-iron gem pans were one common vessel and hold heat well.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins. Test with a skewer at eighteen minutes; the molasses makes the tops look done before the centres are.
Bran muffins belong to the wave of American health baking that followed the late-nineteenth-century interest in dietary fibre and whole grains — the same current that produced the branded breakfast cereals of the 1890s. Bran was a cheap mill by-product, long fed to livestock, and putting it on the table was partly economy and partly conviction. Its appearance in a meatless cookbook is telling: vegetarian cookery of the period was closely tied to health reform movements, and a muffin sweetened with molasses rather than sugar, leavened with soda and sour milk rather than eggs, fitted that programme neatly. The fact that this is Bran Muffins No. 2 suggests the recipe was common enough to need more than one version.