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Fruit Muffins
2/3 cup graham flour, 1 cup entire wheat flour, 1/2 cup white flour, 1/4 cup sugar, 3 tbsp. molasses, 1 cup sour milk, 2 tbsp. melted shortening, 1 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. mapleine, 3/4 cup fruit (dates, nuts, raisins, etc.), 2 tsp. Royal baking powder, 1 tsp. soda.
Mix and sift dry ingredients, cut fruit medium fine, add molasses, milk and mapleine. Beat well, add melted shortening, pour in gem pans, and bake in medium oven.
— Mrs. H. P. Frost
A straightforward sour-milk muffin from the era when a household kept three kinds of wheat flour in the bin. A few of the ingredients and vessels need translating.
- The floursGraham flour is coarse whole wheat with the bran left in; "entire wheat" flour is finer whole wheat. Modern stone-ground whole wheat covers the graham, and standard whole wheat flour the entire wheat, with a half cup of all-purpose for the rest. Total dry flour is about 2 1/6 cups.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, not spoiled pasteurized milk. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left to stand ten minutes. The acid is what the teaspoon of soda is there to react with.
- MapleineA maple-flavored extract sold widely in the early twentieth century and still made. Any maple flavoring works; a teaspoon of real maple syrup is not the same thing, since the extract carries flavor without added liquid or sugar.
- Gem pansHeavy cast-iron muffin pans with rounded cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin, greased, is the equivalent. The batter fills about twelve cups two-thirds full.
- Oven temperatureA "medium oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F, though period usage varies. Muffins with molasses and whole grain brown quickly, so the lower end is safer. Bake roughly 18-22 minutes, until a tester comes out clean.
- Mixing"Beat well" is the one instruction to disregard. Whole-wheat muffin batter toughens with overworking; stir only until the dry flour disappears, then add the melted shortening. Lumps in the batter are correct.
- Both soda and baking powderThe soda neutralizes the acid in the sour milk and molasses; the baking powder supplies the rest of the lift. Do not drop one for the other. Get the batter into the pans and the oven promptly once mixed.
- The fruitThree-quarters of a cup, cut medium fine, of dates, raisins, chopped nuts, or a mix. Tossing the cut fruit with a spoonful of the sifted flour keeps it from settling to the bottom.
Muffins like this sit at the point where the American whole-grain reform movement met the convenience of chemical leavening. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the 1830s temperance preacher and dietary reformer who argued for coarse unbolted wheat against the fashionable white loaf; by 1900 his name had outlived his crusade and simply denoted a flour on the grocer's shelf. Mapleine, a maple substitute marketed by the Crescent Manufacturing Company of Seattle, was heavily promoted to home bakers in the 1910s and 1920s as a cheap stand-in for maple syrup, and its appearance here, alongside the brand-name call for Royal baking powder, dates the recipe to that advertising-saturated moment. Church and society cookbooks such as the Philathea, compiled from members' own contributions and sold to raise funds, are among the best surviving records of what brand names actually reached the ordinary kitchen.