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Oatmeal Muffins
1 cup of warmed cooked oatmeal 3 cups of flour 1½ cups milk 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Add milk to warm oatmeal. Sift together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt and add to oatmeal. Then add egg and butter. 1/4 cup sugar teaspoon salt egg, well beaten tablespoon melted butter ALUME Pure in the Baking Baking 2 cups sifted flour
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original page layout, and the book gives no oven temperature or baking time at all. Both need filling in before you start.
- Reassembling the listRead it as: 1 cup warmed cooked oatmeal, 3 cups flour, 1 1/2 cups milk, 4 level teaspoons baking powder, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 egg well beaten, 1 tablespoon melted butter. The broken "ALUME ... Pure in the Baking" fragment is stray advertising type; the trailing "2 cups sifted flour" is stray type from elsewhere on the page and does not belong to this method either.
- Which flour measure to trustTake the 3 cups from the ingredient list. The trailing "2 cups sifted flour" appears to be stray type from elsewhere on the page; with 1 1/2 cups milk it would give a noticeably looser batter than a muffin tin wants.
- OvenBake at 400-425F for 20-25 minutes, until the tops are domed and dry to a skewer. Muffins raised with this much baking powder want a hot oven so the gas sets the crumb before it collapses.
- Calumet baking powderA double-acting phosphate-and-aluminium powder still sold today; any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes cup for cup. Four teaspoons to 3 cups of flour is on the generous side of standard, so measure level as instructed or the muffins will taste faintly metallic.
- The oatmealThis means leftover cooked porridge, not dry oats. Warm and loose enough to stir, not chilled and set. Old-fashioned rolled oats cooked to a soft porridge give the best texture; instant packets are too gluey.
- MixingStir only until the dry flour disappears. The instruction to sift the dry ingredients together matters here because the powder has to be evenly distributed in one quick mixing; a beaten batter turns tough and tunnelled.
- YieldThis is a large batch (3 cups flour plus a cup of cooked oatmeal), so expect to fill more than one standard twelve-cup tin. Grease the tins well; oatmeal batters stick.
This comes from one of the branded baking-powder booklets that flooded American kitchens in the first decades of the twentieth century, when Calumet, Royal, Rumford and others competed hard for the home baker's loyalty. The booklets were distributed by the manufacturers and were written to make the product indispensable, which is why the brand name appears inside the ingredient list rather than being left as a generic "baking powder". The recipe itself belongs to a much older thrift tradition: cooked oatmeal was a breakfast staple and rarely made in exact amounts, so leftover porridge was worked into muffins, griddle cakes and bread the next morning rather than thrown out. The garbled column of type on this page, with fragments of the advertisement mixed into the method, is a fair record of how densely these little books packed print around their selling copy.