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Corn Muffins with Yeast
1 cake compressed yeast 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 2 level tablespoons brown sugar 4 level tablespoons lard or butter 2 eggs, well beaten 2½ cups corn meal 1 cup sifted white flour 1 teaspoon salt Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the lukewarm milk. Add lard or butter, cornmeal, flour, eggs and salt. Beat well. Fill wellgreased muffin pans two-thirds full. Set to rise in a warm place, free from draft, until light-about one and one half hours. Bake in hot oven twenty minutes.
If prepared over night use only one fourth cake of yeast, and an extra half teaspoon of salt.
CORN MUFFINS No. 1 1 cup white flour 1/2 cup corn meal 1 tablespoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 3/4 teaspoon soda 1 egg 1 cup sour milk 1 tablespoon melted butter Mix the dry ingredients; add the egg, beaten into the milk, and the melted butter. Beat thoroughly and bake in well-greased tins. CORN MUFFINS No. 2 Follow the recipe for Egg Muffins using half corn meal and half white flour. 1 cup flour 1/4 teaspoon salt
Three muffin recipes on one leaf: a yeast-raised cornmeal batter and two quick versions. The yeast one is the interesting one, and the one most likely to go wrong for a cook used to baking powder.
- The hinge: it rises in the pan, not the bowlThis is a batter, not a dough, and it is portioned into the tins before its only rise. Do not knock it back or stir it once it has puffed; carry the pans to the oven gently.
- One cake of compressed yeastThe common small cake of compressed (fresh) yeast was about 0.6 oz, though larger cakes were also sold and the book does not say which is meant. The usual substitution is one packet, roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons, of active dry yeast; a quarter cake would then be a scant half teaspoon.
- "Scalded and cooled"Scalding was routine when milk was raw, chiefly to keep it sweet; it is also said to deactivate something in raw milk that slackens a dough. With pasteurised milk you can skip it, but the milk must be lukewarm, not hot, or it will kill the yeast.
- Hot ovenRead that as 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits a standard muffin tin; the tops should be set and lightly coloured.
- LardLard was an ordinary household fat here and gives a tender crumb. Butter works with no change in quantity; melt it and let it cool before it meets the yeast.
- Cornmeal absorbs differently nowStone-ground meal drinks more liquid than modern degerminated cornmeal. If the batter looks stiff rather than droppable after beating, loosen it with a few tablespoons of warm milk.
- Sour milk in No. 1Cultured buttermilk is the direct replacement, cup for cup. The 3/4 teaspoon of soda is there to react with its acid; sweet milk with this recipe will taste soapy and rise poorly.
- YieldThe yeast batter should fill somewhere between a dozen and sixteen standard muffin cups two-thirds full, depending on the tin. No. 1 makes perhaps eight to ten.
- The stray line at the end"1 cup flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt" is an orphaned fragment, not part of No. 2; it may belong to the Egg Muffins recipe referenced there, or to whatever recipe followed. For No. 2, use any plain egg-muffin formula and swap half the flour for cornmeal.
Yeast-raised corn breads are older than chemically leavened ones, and this recipe is a survival rather than an innovation: before reliable baking powder reached American kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, a batter bread of cornmeal, milk and eggs was lifted either by beaten egg, by saleratus and sour milk, or by a spoonful of the household's yeast. Compressed yeast sold in cakes made the last of those practical for a weeknight, and the overnight variation with a quarter cake is a slower method of the same kind.