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Corn Meal Muffins
The very best are made with yeast, but these are very good and can be made on shortest notice. "Whoe'er rejects them must be hard to please, And ripe for treasons, stratagems and spoils." 1 pound of white cornmeal (not quite a quart). 1 ounces of fresh butter, lard, or both mixed. 1 pint of boiling water. 1 1/2 pints of cold milk (3 cups).
Half pound of flour. Salt.
Yolks, only, of 4 eggs. 2 small teaspoonfuls of baking powder.
Put the shortening in a saucepan with the water, boil, and scald the meal with them. Add the salt, then the milk and flour alternately, then the yolks, and lastly the powder beaten in well with the wire egg-whisk. Bake in greased muffin rings, 10 or 15 minutes, in a hot oven. Serve hot. The batter must be thin to make good muffins. Make the pan hot on which the rings are placed, before filling, to prevent running under; otherwise use rings with bottoms.
In daily practice we learn short ways to work, with fewest vessels. When the object is to thoroughly scald the meal, it is not best to put the unmelted shortening with it first, but the way indicated above is good for all kinds of corn breads. The milk is necessary to give good color in baking.
A professional hotel-kitchen formula, scaled by weight and built on a scalded-meal batter. Two details carry the recipe: the meal must be properly scalded, and the batter must stay thin.
- Scalding is the hingeBoiling water and fat poured over the cornmeal gelatinises the starch, which is what keeps these tender rather than gritty. Pour it on all at once and stir hard; a lukewarm scald leaves the meal sandy no matter how long the muffins bake.
- The shortening quantity is garbled"1 ounces" is a printer's error and could be 1, 2 or 4 ounces. For a pound of meal plus half a pound of flour, 2 to 4 ounces of butter or lard is the sensible range; the text itself is not reliable here.
- Weights in cupsA pound of white cornmeal runs to about 3 1/2 cups, which is what the author's "not quite a quart" points to. Half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups. A pint is 2 cups, so the liquid total is 5 cups against 1 1/2 lb of dry.
- Hot ovenA "hot oven" in period usage is generally taken as somewhere in the 400 to 450F range. At the upper end of that, the 10 to 15 minutes given is plausible for standard muffin-tin size.
- Muffin ringsThese are bottomless metal rings set on a griddle or heavy sheet, of the sort still sold for English muffins. Heating the sheet first sets the batter before it can creep under the ring. A greased 12-cup muffin tin does the same job with less trouble.
- White cornmealFine-ground white meal was widely preferred in this period, particularly in the South, and gives a paler, softer crumb. Yellow meal works but changes both colour and flavour; coarse stone-ground meal will not scald as smoothly.
- Four spare whitesOnly the yolks go in, which is what makes the crumb rich and the colour deep. Keep the whites for meringue or a white cake rather than beating them back into this batter.
- Baking powder lastIt goes in at the very end, whisked through the thin batter, and the pans should already be hot. Time spent standing after that point is leavening lost.
- YieldThe full batch is large by domestic standards: at least two dozen standard muffins, quite possibly more. Halving it is straightforward, using 2 yolks.
The couplet is lifted, with a wink, from The Merchant of Venice — Lorenzo on the man who has no music in himself, "fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils" — a joke that assumed the reader knew the line. The recipe is given in pounds and pints, thinks in terms of "fewest vessels," and pauses to explain why the shortening goes into the water rather than the meal. The preference for white cornmeal, and the opening admission that the yeast-raised version is better, both point backward to an older tradition of corn breads leavened slowly overnight; chemical baking powder, commercially available in the United States from around the 1860s, is here the concession to speed, and the author says as much.