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Muffins
2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 tablespoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 2 eggs 1 tablespoon shortening Sift together flour, baking powder, sugar and salt; add milk, well-beaten eggs and melted shortening; mix well. Grease muffin tins and put two tablespoons of batter into each. Bake in hot oven 20 to 25 minutes.
A plain American quick-bread muffin from a baking powder company's promotional booklet — the proportions still work, though the mixing method needs a light hand.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "hot oven"; in period usage that is somewhere in the region of 400-425F. At the upper end they may be done nearer 20 minutes than 25, so start checking early.
- Do not mix wellThe instruction to "mix well" is the one thing to ignore. Stir only until the flour disappears and the batter still looks lumpy — beating develops gluten and gives tough muffins with tunnels through the crumb.
- ShorteningAt the time this meant lard, butter or the newer hydrogenated vegetable fat. Melted butter is the best-tasting choice; a single tablespoon for the whole batch makes these leaner and more bread-like than a modern muffin.
- Baking powder quantityThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the generous side by current practice, which runs nearer 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup. Royal's cream-of-tartar powder was single-acting, and the book exists to sell baking powder. Two teaspoons is ample with a fresh tin.
- Pan size and yieldTwo tablespoons of batter per cup suits the small gem tins of the period. In standard modern muffin tins that fills a cup only a quarter or so; filling to two-thirds instead gives fewer, larger muffins that will want the longer end of the baking time.
- GreasingPaper liners were not in common home use when this was written. They work here, but the muffins brown better and get a crisper edge in a well-greased tin.
- ServingThese are meant hot from the oven with butter, at breakfast or tea. With so little fat and sugar they stale within hours.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of the most aggressive advertisers in American food publishing, and its booklets were given away freely to put a specific tin in a specific kitchen cupboard. That commercial purpose explains both the branded ingredient written into the line of the recipe and the free hand with leavening. The muffin itself is the American quick bread rather than the yeast-raised English muffin baked on a griddle: chemical leavening, a batter poured into individual cups, and a total working time of a few minutes. Small cast-iron pans for these were sold as gem pans, and "gems" was a common name for the result well into the twentieth century. Recipes of this shape spread rapidly as chemical leavening became cheap and widely available, and the formula here — two cups flour, one cup milk, two eggs, a little fat and sugar — is close to the standard ratio still taught for plain muffins.