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Fruit Bran Muffins
2 tablespoons molasses 2 cups milk 1 cup bran 1/4 cup English walnut meats 1 cup entire wheat flour 1 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 cup raisins Mix molasses, milk, bran, flour, salt, baking powder, nut meats broken in pieces, and raisins cut in pieces. Bake in a hot oven in muffin tins for thirty minutes.
A lean, eggless, butterless muffin from the bran-and-whole-grain enthusiasm of the early twentieth century. The batter is far wetter than a modern muffin batter, and that is deliberate.
- Let the batter restBran absorbs liquid slowly, and 2 cups of milk to 1 cup of bran and 1 cup of flour looks alarmingly thin when first mixed. Stir it up and leave it 10 minutes before filling the tins; it will thicken to a heavy pourable batter.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period this is usually read as somewhere around 400-425F, though period usage varies. The recipe says thirty minutes; at that heat it is worth checking from about 20 minutes on.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole wheat flour, milled to include the bran and germ. Ordinary modern whole wheat works; it is not the same as graham flour, which is coarser, though either will do here.
- BranUnprocessed miller's bran or wheat bran cereal, not bran flakes and not oat bran. The last two behave quite differently with this much milk.
- No fat and no eggThe recipe contains neither, which is common in health-reform and economy baking of the period. The result is moist but crumbly and likely to stale fast -- eat them the day they are made, or split and toast them after.
- Grease the tins wellWith no fat in the batter, molasses and bran will weld themselves to bare metal. Butter or oil the cups generously, or use papers.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to one cup of flour is high by modern standards, but the bran contributes bulk without gluten and needs the lift. Keep it as written; use a fresh tin of powder.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins, filled two-thirds full.
Bran muffins of this kind sit in a broad early-twentieth-century context: a health-reform movement that had made bran a virtue in its own right through sanitarium cookery and the early breakfast-cereal trade, and, in the same years, American food-conservation campaigns that urged stretching wheat flour with coarser grains. Meatless cookery was promoted both as economy and as dietary reform, and the two arguments were often made together. Whether this particular recipe's lack of butter and eggs reflects restriction, reform, or simple economy cannot be told from the recipe itself; molasses supplies what sweetness and colour there is. Raisins and walnuts were cheap and kept well.