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Cereal Muffins
1/2 cup cooked hominy, oatmeal or other cereal 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 tablespoons shortening 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 1 cup flour 1/2 cup corn meal 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder Mix together cereal, salt, melted shortening, beaten egg and milk. Add flour and corn meal which have been sifted with baking powder; beat well. Bake in greased muffin tins or shallow pan in hot oven 25 to 30 minutes.
A thrift muffin built on leftover breakfast porridge, from one of the Royal Baking Powder company's promotional books. It works, but the leavening and the bake time both reflect an older product and an older oven.
- The hinge: the cereal must be smooth and coolBreak up the cooked hominy, oatmeal or grits with a fork before anything else goes in; lumps of stiff porridge will not disperse once flour is added. Warm cereal will start cooking the beaten egg, so let it come to room temperature.
- "Hot oven"Conventionally taken as somewhere around 400 to 425F; the book itself gives no temperature. At that heat it is worth checking at 18 to 20 minutes rather than waiting out the full 25 to 30.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons to a cup and a half of meal and flour is well above the modern rate of about a teaspoon per cup. Royal was then a cream of tartar (tartrate) powder, which releases its gas faster than today's double-acting sodium aluminum sulphate blends. About three teaspoons of modern double-acting powder should give a comparable lift.
- Work quicklyA single-acting tartrate powder does most of its gassing the moment it hits liquid. Have the tins greased and the oven at temperature before you mix, and get the batter in immediately.
- HominyCooked hominy here most likely means a hominy or coarse grits porridge rather than drained whole hominy. Leftover grits, oatmeal, cream of wheat or cooked rice would all serve in its place.
- ShorteningIn 1920s American usage this is lard or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco; melted butter works and tastes better, though the crumb will brown a little faster.
- YieldRoughly 10 to 12 standard muffins, or a shallow pan cut into squares. Cornmeal muffins are best eaten fresh.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a long line of pamphlets issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, in which every recipe naturally calls for Royal by name; the books were given away or sold for pennies. Cereal muffins of this kind sit squarely in the household economy of the period: leftover porridge was a routine fact of the kitchen, and cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s are full of ways to fold yesterday's oatmeal or hominy into today's bread. The habit was reinforced by wartime food conservation campaigns, which pressed cooks to stretch wheat flour with corn meal and other grains — a wheat-and-corn muffin carrying a half cup of cooked cereal is about as economical as a quick bread gets.