Corn Muffins
3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/4 cup molasses cup milk 1 egg, well beaten 1 tablespoon melted butter Sift together thoroughly cornmeal, flour, baking powder and salt. Add gradually milk and molasses and beat thoroughly, then add egg and butter. Bake in hot buttered gem pans 25 minutes. 1 cup white flour 1 cup Graham flour 1 tablespoon sugar
A Calumet Baking Powder promotional recipe of the muffin-batter type: dry ingredients sifted, liquids beaten in, egg and fat last. The batter is thin and should be mixed briskly, not kneaded or over-beaten once the egg goes in.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan with rounded cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; preheat it with the butter in the cups so the batter hits hot metal, which is what the original intends by "hot buttered."
- A hot ovenOven heat -- The recipe gives no oven temperature; "hot" here describes the buttered gem pans, not the oven. A moderately hot oven, around 400-425F, is a reasonable modern choice for the stated 25 minutes; test with a skewer earlier if your cups are small.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour, milled with the bran and germ. Ordinary stone-ground whole-wheat is the nearest substitute; it absorbs more liquid than white flour, so the batter will look slack at first and thicken as it stands.
- Baking powder quantityThree level teaspoons is generous, though the dry side here is not just the two cups of flour: the method also sifts in cornmeal, whose quantity has dropped out of this ingredient list. Modern practice runs one to one and a quarter teaspoons per cup of flour. Calumet was a double-acting powder, and the recipe was written to sell it; two teaspoons gives plenty of lift and less of the metallic aftertaste.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and much darker. The quarter cup both sweetens and browns the muffins quickly, so watch the tops in the last five minutes.
- SaltThe method calls for salt to be sifted with the dry ingredients though no amount is given. Half a teaspoon for two cups of flour is the usual proportion.
- YieldWith the cornmeal and milk quantities missing from this text, the yield can only be estimated; two cups of flour plus the liquid and meal will fill roughly a dozen standard cups. They are best eaten warm; whole-grain muffins with molasses go dense once cold.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of many branded cookbooks that food manufacturers distributed free or for a few cents from the 1890s onward. The point of such books was to fix the brand name into the ingredient list, which is why the leavening here is specified by name and by a generous measure. The recipe itself belongs to the American quick-bread tradition that chemical leavening created: before reliable baking powder, a breakfast bread like this needed either yeast and hours of rising or a beaten-egg batter. Graham flour, generally traced to the temperance reformer Sylvester Graham, whose campaign belongs principally to the 1830s and 1840s, carried a whiff of nutritional virtue in this period, and molasses was still the everyday sweetener in many households where refined sugar was the more expensive choice.