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Oatmeal Muffins (Cup cooked oatmeal cups flour)
1 cup cooked oatmeal 1½ cups flour 2 tablespoons sugar 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup milk 1 egg 2 tablespoons melted butter Mix and bake as Rice Muffins.
Graham Muffins I 1¼ cups Graham flour 1/3 cup molasses 1 cup flour ¾ teaspoon soda 1 cup sour milk 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk to molasses, and combine mixtures; then add butter.
A leftover-porridge muffin from Fannie Farmer's book, written in the shorthand of a chapter where one set of directions serves a dozen variations. The cross-reference to Rice Muffins carries the whole method.
- The missing method"Mix and bake as Rice Muffins" points to the base directions: sift the dry ingredients together, add the cooked cereal with the milk and beaten egg, and stir in the melted butter last. Mixing only until the flour disappears is the usual precaution against a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Cooked oatmealThis is yesterday's breakfast porridge, cooked soft and cooled, not rolled oats or instant oats from the packet. A cup of cold cooked oatmeal is dense and sticky; break it up with a fork or with a little of the milk before combining, or it stays in lumps through the batter.
- OvenNo temperature is given here; a hot oven of this period is usually read as somewhere around 400–425°F. Twenty to twenty-five minutes in buttered tins; the oatmeal keeps the crumb moist, so a skewer test is more reliable than colour.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to 1½ cups of flour is high by modern standards, but the cooked oatmeal is heavy and unleavened and the batter needs the lift. If the powder is old, replace it — this batter has no other rising agent.
- YieldRoughly 12 standard muffins, or 8 large. Best eaten the day they are made; they stale quickly.
- On the Graham muffinsThat second formula is a separate recipe using sour milk and soda rather than baking powder. Cultured buttermilk is the closest modern stand-in for sour milk; ordinary milk soured with vinegar is thinner and gives a slacker batter.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ retained. Modern stoneground whole-wheat is the nearest equivalent; regular whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer, less nubbly crumb.
Fannie Farmer's muffin chapter is built on a single base batter rung through the cooked starches a New England kitchen might have standing cold in the pantry — rice, cornmeal, oatmeal. Cooked cereal was often made in quantity for breakfast, and folding the surplus into a quick bread the next morning was a common economy; it helps explain why the recipe is only a list of proportions with a pointer to another page. Graham flour, in the recipe following, takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached unbolted wheat against the fashionable white loaf; by the end of the century his name had largely detached from the crusade and simply meant coarse whole wheat on a grocer's shelf.