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Graham Muffins
1 teaspoon salt 1 cup of milk 1 cup white flour 1 cup Graham flour 1 tablespoon sugar. 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Sift together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
Bake in hot buttered gem pans 25 minutes. teaspoon salt cup of milk egg, well beaten 1 tablespoon melted butter Add gradually milk, egg and butter.
A plain quick-bread batter of the type that filled early twentieth-century baking powder pamphlets. Several of the quantities in the ingredient list have not survived intact, so treat the proportions below as guidance rather than a transcription.
- Missing quantitiesThe amounts of graham flour, sugar, salt, milk and egg are not stated in usable form here — only the three level teaspoons of baking powder and one tablespoon of melted butter are certain. A standard muffin of this era runs about 2 cups graham flour, 2 tablespoons sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 cup milk and 1 egg, but that is a reconstruction, not what the page says.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, bran and germ included, sold under Sylvester Graham's name. Modern whole wheat flour is the nearest equivalent; a stone-ground coarse grind is closer still. It absorbs liquid more slowly than white flour, so let the batter stand five minutes before filling the pans.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin with deep rounded cups. "Hot buttered" means the greased pan goes into the oven empty until it sizzles, then the batter is added — this is what gives the crisp shell. A modern steel muffin tin will not take the same preheating abuse; cast iron or a heavy nonstick pan is better.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was normal for the period. For a modern oven, 400-425F is the usual range for muffins of this kind; the recipe's twenty-five minutes fits a full-sized gem cup at that heat, and smaller cups will be done sooner.
- MixingDry ingredients sifted together, wet added gradually — stir only until the flour disappears. Graham batters look lumpier than white-flour ones and should. Beating them smooth develops gluten and gives tough, tunnelled muffins.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was an alum-phosphate powder, the type later marketed as double-acting. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes teaspoon for teaspoon. Three teaspoons is a lot of lift and suggests somewhere around two cups of flour.
- YieldA batter on this scale fills about twelve standard muffin cups, or eight to nine deep gem cups. Best eaten warm within the hour; graham muffins go dense and damp by the next day.
Reliable Recipes was one of the cookbooklets issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, and the brand name written into the ingredient list rather than the generic "baking powder" is the whole point of the book: chemical leavening firms of the 1900s and 1910s gave away recipe collections to teach housewives to bake without yeast and to fix one brand in the habit. Graham flour carries an older evangelism. Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister who preached dietary reform in the 1830s, argued that unbolted wheat flour was healthier and morally steadier than the fine white flour of commercial bakers; his name stuck to the coarse whole-wheat grind long after his temperance lectures were forgotten. By the time this booklet appeared, graham muffins were simply a wholesome everyday breakfast bread, made in the cast-iron gem pans that were by then a familiar fixture in American kitchens.