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Graham Muffins II
1 cup Graham or entire wheat flour 3/4 cup flour 1/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 egg 3 tablespoons melted butter 5 teaspoons baking powder Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk gradually, egg well beaten, and melted butter; bake in hot oven in buttered gem pans twenty-five minutes.
Rye Muffins I Make as Graham Muffins II, substituting rye meal for Graham flour. 1/4 cups rye meal 1¼ cups flour
A plain whole-wheat muffin from Fannie Farmer's book, leavened hard with baking powder and mixed by the muffin method. It comes together in the time the oven takes to heat.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan, with cups that are often smaller than a modern tin's. The recipe gives no yield; a batter of this size will roughly fill a standard 12-cup pan, and would likely have made more in the smaller gem cups.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "hot oven" is conventionally read today as somewhere around 400-425F. At that heat 25 minutes is about the outside limit for muffins this size; start testing at 18 to 20 minutes, when the tops are domed and a pick comes out clean.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat with the bran and germ left in. Ordinary whole-wheat flour works, though stone-ground is closer in texture. "Entire wheat flour" in period usage means a finer whole-wheat grind, so the recipe treats them as interchangeable.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons to 1 3/4 cups of flour is a heavy hand by current standards; period powders were generally single-acting, though how much of the difference that accounts for is unclear. Modern double-acting powder at that rate can leave a soapy, metallic edge; 2 to 3 teaspoons is nearer today's proportion.
- MixingStir only until the dry flour disappears. A lumpy batter is correct; beating it smooth develops gluten and gives tunnels and a tough crumb.
- Melted butterLet it cool slightly before adding, and have the milk and egg at room temperature, or the butter will seize into flecks when it meets cold milk.
- ServingThese are barely sweet, a quarter cup of sugar across a dozen muffins, and were meant for the breakfast table with butter and preserves rather than as a sweet cake.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer who argued that finely bolted white flour stripped bread of what the body needed and urged coarse, unsifted whole wheat instead. His name outlived his movement, attaching itself to the flour and to the cracker, and by the time Fannie Farmer was teaching at the Boston Cooking School, Graham flour was simply a staple on the pantry shelf rather than a cause. Its appearance here, in a chapter of quick breads raised with baking powder, shows how thoroughly reform baking had been absorbed into ordinary middle-class breakfast cookery: the moral argument is gone, and what remains is a nutty, slightly coarse muffin that a cook could have on the table in half an hour.