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Bran Muffins
1 cup bran 1½ cups flour 1 cup sour or sweet milk 3/4 tsp. soda (if sour milk is used) 3 tsp. Royal baking powder (if sweet milk is used) 1/3 cup molasses 2 tbsp. melted fat 1/2 tsp. salt 1 tbsp. sugar
— Mrs. Hiram B. Gibbs
A plain quick-bread formula from the era when bran was sold loose as a byproduct of the flour mill. The recipe lists ingredients but no method, oven or yield, so those need filling in.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given. Muffins of this type are usually baked around 400F for 18-22 minutes; the tops should spring back.
- YieldThe batter makes about 10-12 standard muffins, or 8 in a large tin. Fill cups about two-thirds full.
- Method, since none is givenWhisk bran, flour, salt, sugar and the leavening together; combine milk, molasses and melted fat separately; stir the two together only until no dry flour remains. Overmixing a molasses batter of this kind gives tough, tunnelled muffins.
- Sour milk"Sour milk" meant milk left to sour naturally, and so acidic. Buttermilk is the usual modern substitute, and it is the version to use if you want the soda in the recipe to have something to react with. With sweet (fresh) milk, use the baking powder instead as directed.
- Molasses and sodaThe recipe pairs the 3/4 teaspoon of soda with the sour milk, which supplies the acid; molasses is mildly acidic as well. The sugars in the molasses make the muffins brown quickly, so watch the bottoms toward the end of baking.
- BranUse plain wheat bran, not a bran breakfast cereal, which is sweetened and already flaked or extruded. Letting the bran soak in the milk for 10 minutes before mixing softens it and gives a less gritty crumb.
- Melted fatAt the time this would have meant lard, beef drippings or butter. Any of those, or a neutral oil, works; butter gives the best flavour with molasses.
- Royal baking powderA brand name, not a special product. Any modern baking powder can be substituted; 3 teaspoons for 1 1/2 cups of flour is on the generous side by present-day proportions, so 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons would be ample.
Bran muffins belong to the period when milling byproducts moved from the animal trough to the breakfast table. Health reformers and the early breakfast-cereal industry promoted wheat bran as a corrective to the fine white flour that improved roller milling had made cheap he ccereced twentieth century, and by the time community cookbooks like this one were compiled, bran was an ordinary grocery item bought by the bag. The recipe's molasses is equally of its moment: it was a common sweetener of the American pantry, dark and assertive, and it paired naturally with sour milk and soda in a household that still kept milk until it clabbered. Philathea cook books were fundraising collections gathered from the Philathea classes, adult women's Bible study groups organized in Baptist and other Protestant churches from the 1890s onward, which explains the format here: a signed list of quantities from a member who assumed every other reader already knew how to mix and bake a muffin.