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One-Egg Muffins
2 cups sifted flour 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup milk Sift flour, baking powder, salt and sugar together three times, put in bowl, add the milk 1 tablespoon sugar 1 egg, well beaten 1/3 cup melted lard and well beaten egg, beat well and then add the lard. Bake in well greased muffin rings 20 or 25 minutes in moderate oven.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column printing, so read it as: 2 1/2 cups flour, 2 level teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 cup boiled rice, 3/4 cup milk, 1 egg well beaten, 1/3 cup melted lard. The rice is easy to miss and it is the whole point of the muffin.
- Order of workSift the dry ingredients three times, stir in the cooled boiled rice, then add milk and beaten egg, beat well, and add the melted lard last; the original does not say where the rice goes in, so that placement is an inference. Sifting three times distributes the baking powder evenly and aerates the flour, though once through a sieve with a good stir will do.
- The riceUse plain white rice boiled soft and cooled to room temperature; about 1/3 cup raw yields the cup of cooked rice called for. Hot rice risks setting the egg. Fluff it apart so it disperses rather than sitting in lumps.
- Leavening looks thinTwo teaspoons of baking powder for 2 1/2 cups of flour is a little below the modern norm of roughly a teaspoon per cup of flour. Calumet was a double-acting powder, advertised as strong and economical. Expect a dense, tender, biscuit-like muffin rather than a high domed one.
- Batter consistencyThree-quarters of a cup of milk against 2 1/2 cups of flour gives a stiff batter; the moisture in the rice makes up the difference. If it will not drop from the spoon, add milk a tablespoon at a time. Do not beat once the flour is wet beyond what it takes to combine, whatever the original says about beating well.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually taken as 350-375F. Modern practice often bakes muffins hotter for a better rise; at the lower end of moderate the stated 20 to 25 minutes is about right for a standard 12-cup tin.
- Muffin ringsThese were plain metal rings set on a greased baking sheet, filled about two-thirds. A greased 12-cup muffin tin gives the same result with less fuss.
- LardMelted lard gives the shortest, most tender crumb here. Melted butter or a neutral oil works, measured the same; butter will brown the edges faster.
- YieldAbout 12 muffins. Best eaten warm the day they are made.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, a firm founded in the late 1880s that became one of the largest American brands of double-acting powder before it was bought by the Postum Company in 1928, which renamed itself General Foods in 1929. Booklets like this one were given away or mailed for a coupon, and every recipe in them names the brand by measure. The muffin itself belongs to a large family of leftover-rice breads that turn up throughout nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery, especially in the rice-growing South, where cold boiled rice was folded into breads, waffles, griddle cakes and croquettes as a matter of thrift; the rice stretches the flour and holds moisture, giving a moist, slightly chewy crumb that flour alone will not produce.