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Berkshire Muffins
1/2 cup corn meal. 1/2 cup flour. 1/2 cup cooked rice. 2 tablespoons sugar. 1 egg. 1 tablespoon melted butter. 1/2 teaspoon salt ⅔ cup scalded milk (scant) ½ egg ½ tablespoon melted butter 3 teaspoons baking powder Turn scalded milk on meal, let stand five minutes; add rice, and flour mixed and sifted with remaining dry ingredients. Add yolk of egg well beaten, butter, and white of egg beaten stiff and dry. 1 cup corn meal 1 cup flour 2 cup sugar
The ingredient list has been scrambled in transcription — the quantities and the method have come apart, and one ingredient appears in the directions with no measure at all. Read it as a cornmeal-and-rice muffin and reassemble before you begin.
- The missing riceThe method calls for rice but no quantity survives in this text. Comparable muffin recipes of the period use about half a cup of cold cooked rice, well broken up; treat that as an estimate rather than the original figure.
- Reading the amounts"14 cup sugar" is 1/4 cup — a dropped fraction bar. The full set is 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 3 teaspoons baking powder, a scant 1/2 cup scalded milk, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon melted butter.
- No oven temperatureThe book gives none here. Muffins of this type are generally baked hot, somewhere around 400 to 425F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops spring back and a tester comes out clean.
- Why the milk is scaldedHot milk poured over cornmeal and left five minutes softens the grain so it does not stay gritty in the finished crumb. Let the mush cool to warm before the egg yolk goes in.
- A very stiff batterA scant half cup of liquid for two cups of dry ingredients is little even with the moisture in the rice. Expect a thick, spoonable batter rather than a pourable one; add milk a tablespoon at a time only if it will not drop from the spoon.
- "Stiff and dry"Nineteenth-century shorthand for whites beaten just past the point where they hold a peak, before they begin to look grainy. Fold them in last, in two additions, and bake at once — the baking powder is already working.
- Pan and yieldMakes roughly 8 to 12 muffins depending on the size of the tin, or fills a cast-iron gem pan. Grease well: the sugar and cornmeal stick readily.
Berkshire Muffins belong to a large family of American quick breads that stretch a modest amount of wheat flour with cornmeal and leftovers from the previous meal — here cold boiled rice, which adds moisture and a slightly chewy crumb without costing anything. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book runs many such recipes in this chapter, each varying the ratio of meal to flour or substituting rice, hominy or oatmeal, a reflection of kitchens where the breakfast bread was made fresh each morning and the pantry decided which version it would be. The name presumably points to the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, though the book offers no explanation and place-names in this period were attached to recipes loosely, more as a label than a claim of origin. Scalding the milk onto the meal is the step that makes this recipe work.