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Calumet Muffins
4 cups sifted flour. 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 2 cups sweet milk 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 tablespoon sugar Sift together thoroughly flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Add gradually milk and eggs. Bake in hot buttered gem pans 25 minutes.
If richer muffins are desired, add one or two tablespoons of melted butter, and more sugar, if they are desired sweeter. This recipe will make muffins for a family of 8 or 10. Use proportionately less ingredients for smaller family. (See Illustration, Page 11.) 1 cup cornmeal cup flour 1 teaspoon salt
A plain milk muffin from a baking-powder company's promotional booklet. The text as printed is incomplete, and one line matters more than any other.
- The flour is missingThe ingredient list gives salt, eggs, milk, baking powder and sugar but no flour quantity, even though the method says to sift it. With 2 cups of milk and 2 eggs, a standard muffin batter of this era would take roughly 4 cups of flour; treat that as a reconstruction, not the original figure.
- The stray cornmeal linesThe three lines at the end — cornmeal, flour, salt — belong to the next recipe on the page and have run together in transcription. They are not part of the muffin batter.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin with deep, often oval cups. Any standard 12-cup muffin tin works; the instruction to have it hot and buttered before the batter goes in is worth keeping, as it sets the crust and helps the muffins climb.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes used with saleratus. Whole milk is the direct substitute.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature, only a hot pan. Muffins of this proportion bake at 400-425F; 25 minutes suits deep gem cups, while a shallow modern tin will be done nearer 18-20 minutes.
- Baking powder quantityFour level teaspoons to roughly 4 cups of flour is about a teaspoon per cup, standard then and now. Note that the book exists to sell baking powder, so measure level rather than generous — excess leaves a metallic aftertaste, particularly with the phosphate and alum powders of the day.
- MixingAdd the milk and eggs gradually, as directed, but stop as soon as the flour is damp. A lumpy batter gives tender muffins; a smooth one gives tunnels and toughness.
- YieldThe claim of muffins "for a family of 8 or 10" points to about 18-24 muffins from a modern tin, depending on cup size.
Reliable Recipes was a promotional cookbook issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of the great American baking-powder houses of the turn of the twentieth century, and the brand name appears in the recipe titles as a matter of advertising rather than technique. Booklets of this kind were given away with tins or mailed for a coupon, and they did real work in the kitchen: they showed home cooks the proportions in which to use chemical leavening, and the company had every reason to show them generously. The muffin here is the plainest possible demonstration of what the product does — flour, milk, eggs, salt, a little sugar, and the powder to lift it — with the enrichments of butter and extra sugar offered as optional afterthoughts, in the manner of a period recipe that expects the cook to judge for herself.