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Whole Wheat or Graham Muffins
2 TABLESPOONS BUTTER 2 TABLESPOONS SUGAR I EGG, BEATEN LIGHT I CUP GRAHAM FLOUR I CUP MILK 1/2 CUP FLOUR 1/2 TEASPOONS BAKING POWDER 1/2 TEASPOON SALT Cream butter and sugar together and add egg. Mix dry ingredients well together, and add to egg mixture alternately with milk. Fill well buttered muffin tins 2/3 full and bake 30 minutes at 400°. bake 30 minutes at 400°. Take out of pans and eat at once.
A plain graham muffin of the sort that turned up in camp cookery books because whole wheat flour traveled better than white and needed no yeast. The batter comes together in one bowl and wants a hot oven.
- Baking powder quantityThe leavening is printed as "1/2 teaspoons baking powder," which cannot be right for 1 1/2 cups of flour; period muffin recipes of this size call for 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons. Treat the figure as ambiguous and use 2 teaspoons if you want a reliable rise.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat with the bran and germ left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest substitute; regular whole wheat flour works but gives a finer, less nubbly crumb.
- Oven400F is stated outright. That is correct for muffins, but 30 minutes is long at that heat for standard tins — check at 18 to 20 minutes, and reserve the full half hour for large or deep cups.
- Don't overmixWhole wheat batters toughen quickly once the liquid is in. Fold the dry ingredients and milk in alternately just until no flour shows; a lumpy batter bakes better than a smooth one.
- Rest the batterCoarse graham flour absorbs liquid slowly. Letting the filled tins stand five minutes before they go in softens the bran and improves the texture.
- Buttering the tins"Well buttered" is worth taking literally. Paper liners or a nonstick tin remove the problem entirely, but butter still gives the best crust on the sides.
- YieldMakes about 8 to 10 standard muffins. The instruction to eat them at once is sound advice — whole wheat muffins go dry quickly.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and diet reformer who in the 1830s campaigned for coarse unsifted wheat meal against the fashionable white bread of the day. His followers pressed the flour into biscuits, gems and muffins, and by the late nineteenth century "graham" had shed most of its reforming zeal and simply meant whole wheat on a grocery label. A chemically leavened muffin of this kind needed no yeast, no rising time and no more equipment than a tin and a hot oven.