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Peanut Butter Fruit Muffins
One and one-half cups flour (scant), 1/4 cup sugar, 1 beaten egg, 3/4 cup milk, 1 tbsp. shortening, 3 tsp. Royal baking powder, 3/4 cup chopped dates, prunes or raisins, pinch of salt, 1 rounded tbsp. peanut butter; add milk and beaten egg. Stir in dry ingredients and fruit. Bake about fifteen minutes.
— Ruth G. Bellis
A plain quick-bread muffin batter with peanut butter worked in for richness. The instructions are compressed to the point of being cryptic, so the order of operations needs restating before anything else.
- The missing first stepThe recipe says "add milk and beaten egg" without saying to what. Cream the peanut butter with the shortening and sugar first, then beat in the egg and milk; otherwise the peanut butter stays in lumps and the crumb is uneven.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given at all. Fifteen minutes is a short bake for muffins, which suggests a hot oven; 400-425F is a reasonable modern working range, though this is an inference and not something the recipe states.
- MixingStir the dry ingredients in only until no flour shows. A lumpy batter is correct here; beating it smooth develops gluten and gives you tunnels and a tough, peaked top.
- ShorteningIn American books of this general period shortening commonly means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat such as Crisco. Melted butter can be substituted, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- "Scant" and "rounded"A scant cup is a cup filled just below the rim, so read the flour as a little under 1 1/2 cups. A rounded tablespoon of peanut butter is roughly 20 g, more than a level spoon and less than heaping.
- Royal baking powderA brand name; period recipes often specified brands by habit as much as anything else. Three teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups of flour is generous but not unusual for the period; any modern double-acting powder can stand in measure for measure.
- The peanut butterCommercial peanut butter of the era was unstabilised and unsweetened. Natural stir-in peanut butter is the closer match; a sweetened modern brand will push the muffins sweeter than intended, so consider trimming the sugar.
- Dates and prunesChop them small and toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they sink and stick to the pan. Dried prunes need pitting and are best snipped with scissors.
- YieldThe batter fills about ten standard muffin cups two-thirds full, or a dozen smaller ones. Best eaten warm the day they are made.
Community cookbooks like this one, sold by church and Sunday-school classes to raise funds, are a valuable record of what peanut butter meant to American home cooks once it moved from a health-food novelty to a pantry staple in the first decades of the twentieth century. Early manufacturers and domestic-science writers promoted it as a cheap protein rather than a sandwich spread, and it turns up in period collections in soups, croquettes, loaves and quick breads as often as between two slices of bread. Pairing it with chopped dates or prunes fits the same logic: dried fruit added sweetness and bulk without much sugar, and both ingredients kept well on a shelf. The Philathea classes were adult Bible-study groups for young women, and the recipes carry contributors' names.