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Bacon Muffins
4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder I level teaspoon of salt 1 tablespoon of sugar 6 tablespoons of melted lard 2 eggs, beaten separately 2 tablespoons of crisp bacon, diced 1½ cups of cold water Sift flour once, then measure, add salt, baking powder and sugar, and sift three times. Put flour in mixing bowl, add well beaten eggs, then melted lard, then water, and beat hard; lastly add crisp bacon. Bake in muffin pans 25 to 30 minutes. NOTE-If Calumet Baking Powder is always used it will be found that the muffins will not only be fuller and lighter, but that they will stand longer without getting heavy. Cooks who want their baking to be always the same never fail to use Calumet.
A promotional-booklet muffin from the era when baking powder companies published their own cookbooks. The ingredient list is scrambled — the flour appears last, after the method — and the oven temperature is missing entirely.
- Read the ingredients in orderThe 4 cups of sifted flour printed at the very end is the base of the recipe; it goes in first. Sift, then measure, then sift again with the salt, baking powder and sugar as directed.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Muffins of this type bake at 400-425F; 25 to 30 minutes at that heat suits a full standard muffin cup.
- "Eggs, beaten separately"In period usage this most likely means yolks and whites beaten in separate bowls. The instruction to "add well beaten eggs" and then "beat hard" works against that, so if you do beat the whites apart, fold them in at the end with the bacon rather than beating them into the batter.
- Beat hard, but not too hardModern muffin practice mixes only until the flour disappears; hard beating develops gluten and gives tunnels and a tough crumb. The double-acting powder does not need to be beaten in, so treat "beat hard" as a period habit and stop when the batter is combined.
- LardSix tablespoons of melted lard is a generous 1/3 cup. Melted butter or a neutral oil substitutes measure for measure; lard gives the shortest, most tender crumb and suits the bacon.
- Water, not milkCold water was the economical choice and keeps the flavour clean and bacon-forward. Milk or buttermilk will brown the tops faster and soften the crumb if you prefer that.
- The baconTwo tablespoons of cooked, crisp, diced bacon is a small amount for four cups of flour — a flavour note rather than a filling. Double it if you want bacon in every bite, and drain it well so the fat does not weigh the batter down.
- YieldFour cups of flour makes roughly 18 to 24 standard muffins, depending on pan size. Fill cups two-thirds full.
- CalumetAny double-acting baking powder works. Four level teaspoons to four cups of flour is a standard ratio and needs no adjustment.
Reliable Recipes was the house cookbook of the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, given away and sold cheaply through the first decades of the twentieth century and reissued in many editions. The closing note here — that Calumet muffins "stand longer without getting heavy" — is the whole reason the book existed: double-acting baking powders, which release gas once when wet and again in the oven's heat, were then still displacing single-acting cream-of-tartar powders and homemade saleratus-and-sour-milk leavening, and manufacturers competed hard to prove their reliability to cooks who had been burned by flat biscuits. The recipes themselves are plain, thrifty American baking, and this one shows it: water rather than milk, lard rather than butter, and two tablespoons of bacon stretched across four cups of flour. The company name comes from the Calumet region south of Chicago, whose own name is often traced to the French word for the ceremonial pipe, though the derivation is not settled; the brand was bought by General Foods in the late 1920s and the name is still on shelves.