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Rye Muffins
2 cups rye flour 1 cup flour 5 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 3/4 cups milk 2 eggs 2 tablespoons shortening Sift together flours, baking powder and salt. Add milk, well-beaten eggs and melted shortening; beat two minutes. Have muffin tins very hot and well greased before filling. Bake in hot oven about 25 minutes.
A straightforward quick-bread batter from a baking powder company's promotional book, which explains the generous leavening. A few notes before you start.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no number. "Hot oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F; 425F is a reasonable working figure. Start checking a few minutes before the stated 25, since rye browns quickly and can look done before the centres set.
- The hinge: preheat the tinsThe instruction to have the tins very hot and well greased is the one that matters. Heating the greased pan in the oven while it comes up to temperature gives the batter an immediate lift and a crisp base, which rye batters otherwise lack.
- Baking powder quantityFive teaspoons to three cups of flour is on the high side by current practice, which runs about 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup. This is a Royal Baking Powder book, so a generous hand with the leavening is to be expected. Four teaspoons of a modern double-acting powder will raise these adequately and leave less of a chemical aftertaste.
- Rye flourUse light or medium rye. Dark or pumpernickel rye will give a heavier, denser muffin and may want a little extra milk. The cup of plain flour is doing the structural work, since rye contributes almost no gluten.
- "Flour" means white wheat flourWhere a recipe of this era says simply "flour" it means all-purpose white wheat flour. Rye is always named.
- Beating two minutesThis is a thin, pourable batter rather than the lumpy stir-just-until-combined batter of modern muffin recipes, and the low-gluten rye tolerates the beating. Still, two minutes by hand is enough; do not extend it with a mixer.
- ShorteningMelted butter works and tastes better. Two tablespoons is a lean amount, so grease the tins thoroughly.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins, or 8 to 9 large ones. Best eaten warm.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which distributed them free through grocers and by mail in the early twentieth century. The books were advertising as much as instruction, and the leavening measures reflect it, but they were also genuinely useful. Rye appears here as a wholesome, slightly frugal alternative to white flour, common in households with Northern and Central European roots. Blending rye with wheat rather than using it alone is the standard approach: rye has little gluten, and unassisted it produces something closer to a pudding than a muffin.