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Gluten Muffins
2 cups gluten flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 egg 1 tablespoon butter 2 cups milk Sift together flour and baking powder; add well beaten egg and melted butter to milk; mix well. Bake in greased muffin tins in moderate oven about 35 minutes.
In addition to the above, many recipes such as soups, broths, jellies, ices and plain drop cakes suitable for invalids and convalescents are to be found in the preceding pages of this book.
A plain quick-bread from the invalid-cookery chapter, where the point was a low-starch flour rather than flavor. The one thing to settle before you start is what "gluten flour" meant then versus what sits on the shelf now.
- Gluten flour is not vital wheat glutenEarly twentieth-century "gluten flour" was a wheat flour with much of the starch washed out, sold for diabetic and dyspeptic diets; protein content varied a great deal from brand to brand and often fell short of what was advertised. Today's vital wheat gluten runs about 75 to 80 percent protein; two cups of it would bake into something closer to seitan than a muffin. Use high-gluten bread flour, or bread flour with a couple of tablespoons of vital wheat gluten worked in, if you want a comparable result.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. At that range 35 minutes is plausible for standard muffin cups; judge by a clean tester rather than color.
- The batter is meant to be thinTwo cups of milk to two cups of flour gives a pourable batter, not the thick scoopable kind. Do not thicken it with extra flour.
- Mix as little as possibleMixing -- The original says "mix well," but with a high-protein flour you may prefer to combine wet and dry with a few strokes, leaving lumps, and get the tins into the oven promptly so the baking powder is not spent standing around.
- No salt, no sugarThe absence of sugar fits the restricted-diet purpose; the recipe also gives no salt, for reasons it does not state. A half teaspoon of salt will make them more palatable at table; sugar defeats the original purpose.
- Baking powder quantityThree teaspoons for two cups of flour is on the generous side by modern practice, which usually calls for a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a quarter per cup. It suits a heavy, protein-rich batter that needs help rising.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins. They are best warm from the tin.
"Invalid cookery" was a fixed chapter in household cookbooks well before the 1870s and through the 1920s, when convalescents were nursed at home for weeks and the cook was expected to produce beef tea, barley water, gruels and jellies on the doctor's instruction. Gluten flour belonged to a narrower purpose within that: before insulin became available in the early 1920s, diabetes was managed almost entirely by diet, and starch-reduced breads and muffins were among the few baked goods a diabetic patient was permitted. Commercial gluten flours were sold by the pound for exactly this trade. A Royal Baking Powder promotional book carried such a recipe, with a closing note pointing readers back to the soups, broths and jellies scattered through the earlier chapters.