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Graham Muffins
2 cups graham flour 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon soda 3/4 cup sour milk 1/2 tablespoon shortening Sift the flour with sugar, salt and soda, and turn the bran back into it. Add the milk gradually, the well-beaten egg, and the melted shortening. Fill well-greased muffin-tins about two-thirds full and bake in a hot oven (400 degrees-425 degrees F.) from twenty to twenty-five minutes.
A plain sour-milk muffin of the type that filled American breakfast tables in the 1920s. Two details carry it: real soured milk to react with the soda, and a batter mixed only enough to combine.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely milled whole wheat with the bran left in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest match; ordinary fine whole wheat flour works but gives a softer, less nubby crumb.
- "Turn the bran back into it"Sifting whole wheat flour leaves coarse bran behind in the sieve. Tip it back into the bowl rather than discarding it, or you lose both the character and the volume the recipe counts on.
- Sour milkIn period usage, milk deliberately left to go acid; today's pasteurized milk sours less predictably. Use 3/4 cup buttermilk, or 3/4 cup milk with about 2 teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left to stand five minutes. The acid is structural here, not flavoring: without it the 1/2 teaspoon soda has nothing to react with and can leave a soapy taste.
- ShorteningHalf a tablespoon is about 1 1/2 teaspoons of melted butter or oil. It is a lean batter by modern standards; a full tablespoon gives a more tender muffin without harming the rise.
- Batter consistencyThree-quarters of a cup of liquid to two cups of flour makes a stiff batter that you spoon rather than pour. If it will not drop from the spoon, add milk a tablespoon at a time. Stir only until the flour is damp, as overmixing whole wheat batter toughens it.
- Oven and timing400 to 425F as written is correct for muffins. At the upper end check at eighteen minutes; whole wheat browns faster than it looks and the tops go hard past twenty-five.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten standard muffins, more if your tins are small. Eat them the day they are made, or split and toast them after.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose 1830s lectures pressed Americans to abandon white bolted flour for coarse, bran-rich meal ground from the whole wheat berry. His name outlasted his movement, attaching itself to the flour, the cracker, and to a whole family of homely breakfast breads like this one. By the time New Delineator Recipes appeared, graham muffins had shed their reformist edge entirely and were simply an everyday quick bread — the kind of thing a cook made because there was sour milk in the pantry that needed using and soda to make it rise. Sour-milk baking of this sort was standard in households before reliable refrigeration, when milk on the turn was a resource rather than a loss.