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Date Muffins
1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup sugar 3/4 cup milk 2 cups white flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 pound dates 4 teaspoons baking powder Put the dates in cold water. Remove the seeds, and then wash in hot water. Cut in small pieces. Currants or raisins may be used if preferred. Sift the baking powder, salt and flour together. Cream the butter and sugar. Add the milk and the flour alternately, and lastly, fold in the chopped dates. Bake in buttered muffin tins twenty to twenty-five minutes in hot oven.
A straightforward eggless muffin from the quick-bread pages, easily made today once the oven temperature and the date preparation are translated.
- Mix as little as possibleWith four teaspoons of baking powder and no egg, the rise depends entirely on gas holding in a loose batter. Add the flour and milk in alternating additions and stop stirring the moment the flour disappears; the batter should look lumpy, not smooth.
- "Hot oven"Read this as roughly 400-425F. Twenty to twenty-five minutes at that heat suits a standard 12-cup tin; check at eighteen minutes with a skewer.
- The datesThe soaking, seeding and hot-water washing were for whole dried dates sold loose and dusty. Modern pitted dates need none of it. Half a pound is roughly 1 1/4 cups once chopped, and you can toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons in two cups of flour is high by current practice, though not unreasonable for a batter with no egg to help it lift. If your baking powder is fresh, three teaspoons will do and will leave less of a metallic edge.
- Butter and sugarA quarter cup of butter is 4 tablespoons, and a quarter cup of sugar makes these barely sweet by modern standards; the dates carry most of the sweetness. Creaming without eggs gives a stiff paste, so soften the butter well.
- Batter consistencyThree-quarters cup of milk with two cups of flour produces a very thick, almost scoopable batter. That is correct for the period, but if it will not drop from the spoon add milk a tablespoon at a time.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins, or 8 large. Fill the cups two-thirds full and eat them warm; eggless muffins stale quickly and are best the day they are baked.
Books published under a "meatless" banner in the 1910s and 1920s served two overlapping audiences: households observing Lent or a vegetarian regimen on principle, and households cutting back on meat under wartime and postwar food conservation campaigns. The instruction to soak, seed and wash the dates is a reminder that dried fruit reached the American kitchen loose and unpitted well into the twentieth century; commercially pitted dates only gradually made the step unnecessary. Dates themselves came largely from North Africa and the Middle East before California's Coachella Valley plantings, begun from imported offshoots in the early 1900s, matured into a domestic supply.