Home › Bread, Rolls and Muffins › Squash Muffins
Squash Muffins
4 tbsp. sifted squash, 1½ cup sugar, 2 tbsp. melted butter, 2 cups sweet milk, about 4 cups pastry flour, sifted with 5 level tsp. Royal baking powder or 2 tsp. Slade's cream tartar, and 1 tsp. soda, mix in order given, beat mixture well and bake in gem pans in a hot oven about 20 minutes.
— Mrs. Herbert Tarbell
A plain New England quick bread built on leftover cooked squash, written in the run-on shorthand of a church-society cookbook. A few of its terms and proportions need translating before you commit four cups of flour to it.
- "Sifted squash"This means winter squash already cooked until soft and pushed through a sieve — the same thing as canned or homemade squash or pumpkin puree, unsweetened and unspiced. It is not raw grated squash.
- Four tablespoons is very littleAgainst two cups of milk and four cups of flour, 4 tbsp of puree gives colour and a trace of flavour rather than a squash muffin in the modern sense. To make the squash register you would need considerably more — nearer a cup — and less milk to compensate.
- The sugar looks like a misprintThe sugar may be a misprint -- 1½ cups of sugar in a muffin batter of this size is cake-level sweetness, and the recipe carries no eggs to support it. Treat the printed amount with suspicion and scale to taste.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans are the ancestor of the muffin tin, and their cups were often smaller and deeper than a modern tin's. A standard 12-cup tin works; grease it well and expect the full batch to fill it more than once.
- A hot ovenIn books of this period this is generally taken as somewhere in the 400–450F range. Twenty minutes suits muffin-sized portions, but check early, since a batter this wet browns before the centre sets.
- The leavening alternativesRoyal was a cream-of-tartar (tartrate) baking powder, which begins working as soon as it is wet; 5 level tsp for 4 cups of flour is at the generous end but workable. Slade's cream of tartar was a Boston-packed household brand; 2 tsp cream of tartar with 1 tsp soda is the same chemistry mixed at home. Either way the batter must go into the pans and into the oven at once.
- Pastry flourSofter and lower in protein than all-purpose, sitting between all-purpose and cake flour. Use all-purpose and mix only until the dry streaks disappear, or cut it with a little cornstarch or cake flour.
- MixingIgnore "beat mixture well" once the flour is in. Beating develops gluten and gives tunnelled, tough muffins; the instruction belongs to the wet ingredients.
Philathea cook books were fundraising collections from Philathea classes — adult Bible-study classes for young women that grew out of the Baraca–Philathea movement, generally traced to Syracuse, New York, in the 1890s and widespread across American Protestant churches by the 1910s. Books like this were assembled from members' own cards, which is why the recipes are signed, terse, and full of brand names: Royal baking powder and Slade's cream of tartar were the two competing routes to a chemically leavened bread, and naming both let a cook use whatever was in her pantry. Squash in a muffin is a thrift habit as much as a flavour choice; households that put up winter squash worked leftover cooked flesh into breads, pies and puddings the way later cooks used pumpkin, and the two were treated as more or less interchangeable well into the twentieth century.