Home › Biscuits and Muffins › Corn Meal Muffins
Corn Meal Muffins
3/4 cup corn meal 1 1/4 cups flour 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons sugar 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons shortening 1 egg Sift together corn meal, flour, baking powder, salt and sugar; add milk, melted shortening and well-beaten egg; mix well. Grease muffin tins and drop two tablespoons of mixture into each. Bake about 35 minutes in hot oven.
A standard chemically leavened cornbread batter in muffin form, from a booklet published to sell baking powder. Two numbers need adjusting: the oven time and the leavening.
- Bake time is the thing to watchThirty-five minutes will dry these out. Muffins this size are done in 18 to 22 minutes; test with a skewer at 18 and pull them as soon as it comes out clean.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period that means 400-425F. Use 400F for muffins so the crumb sets before the crust hardens.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons for two cups of dry ingredients is generous by modern measure, and quantities like this are common in cookbooks issued by baking powder companies. Modern double-acting powder does the job at 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons; more than that can leave a soapy, metallic edge.
- Corn mealUse a fine or medium yellow meal. Modern stone-ground meal is generally coarser than the commercially milled meal of the period and benefits from soaking in the milk for ten minutes before the other ingredients go in.
- ShorteningOriginally lard or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco. Melted butter or a neutral oil works, measured at the same two tablespoons.
- Two tablespoons per tinA small portion, suited to the smaller muffin and gem tins of the period. In standard modern muffin cups the batter makes 8 to 10; filling twelve cups gives you very shallow muffins.
- Mixing"Mix well" is the one instruction not to follow literally. Stir only until the dry streaks disappear; beaten cornmeal batter turns tough and tunnelled.
- ServingBest within an hour of baking. They stale quickly, having no fat to speak of and no acid dairy.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of a long line of free and cheap booklets issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, whose product was a cream-of-tartar powder and whose recipes name it in the ingredient list as a matter of course. Corn meal muffins sit at the point where two traditions meet: the older American cornbreads, baked in skillets and leavened with sour milk and saleratus, and the newer store-bought powder that let a cook use sweet milk and get a reliable rise without judging an acid. The generous four teaspoons here may well reflect the habits of manufacturer-sponsored cookery, and the sugar and wheat flour, more than one and a half times the volume of the meal, mark this as a Northern-style corn muffin rather than the plainer, unsweetened cornbread of the South.