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Crumb Muffins
2 cups stale bread crumbs 1 1/4 cups milk 1 cup flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1 tablespoon shortening Soak bread crumbs in cold milk 10 minutes; add flour, baking powder and salt which have been sifted together; add well-beaten eggs and melted shortening; mix well. Heat muffin tins, grease and drop one tablespoon of batter into each. Bake 20 to 25 minutes in hot oven.
A thrift muffin built on stale bread, from one of the baking powder company pamphlets that flooded American kitchens in the early twentieth century. The method is sound; only the oven language and the crumb itself need translating.
- Hot ovenRead this as roughly 400 to 425F. Muffins want a fast oven so the baking powder and steam lift the batter before the crust sets; a slack oven will tend to give a squatter, paler muffin.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old white bread, torn or grated, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in a can. Packaged dry crumbs will drink far more than 1 1/4 cups of milk and give a pasty muffin.
- ShorteningIn a Royal pamphlet of this period this means lard, vegetable shortening or butter, all interchangeable here. Melt and cool it slightly before adding so it does not scramble the eggs.
- Baking powderModern double-acting powder is stronger than some of the period product, but 2 teaspoons to 1 cup of flour is still within normal range given the heavy crumb load. Do not increase it.
- One tablespoon per tinThat measure looks small even for the gem pans of the era, and the quantity of batter here would fill many more than a dozen such tins. In standard 12-cup muffin tins fill each about two-thirds.
- Heat the tins firstThe recipe has you grease the tins hot, which helps the batter set quickly at the bottom. Note that it also says to mix well, against modern muffin practice of minimal mixing.
- DonenessAt 425F these are usually done nearer 20 minutes than 25. They should spring back when pressed and pull slightly from the sides of the cups.
The New Royal Cook Book was advertising literature: Royal Baking Powder Company published a long series of small cookbooks whose recipes all, unsurprisingly, called for Royal by name. Crumb muffins belong to an older thrift tradition that these pamphlets absorbed, in which stale bread was never discarded but soaked back to life in milk for puddings, panadas, brown betties and quick breads. Bread and flour took up a large share of working-class food spending in the nineteenth century, and stretching the last of a loaf into a hot breakfast bread was ordinary economy rather than novelty. The recipe also shows what chemical leavening did to home baking: a muffin like this can be mixed and on the table in about three quarters of an hour, with no yeast, no sponge and no waiting overnight.