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Oatmeal Muffins (Yeast cake dissolved in cup)
3/4 cup scalded milk. 1/4 cup sugar. 1/2 teaspoon salt. ¼ yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm milk 1 cup cold cooked oatmeal 2½ cups flour Add sugar and salt to scalded milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake. Work oatmeal into flour with tips of fingers, and add to first mixture; beat thoroughly, cover, and let rise over night. In morning, fill buttered iron gem pans two-thirds full, let rise on back of range that pan may gradually heat and mixture rise to fill pan. Bake in moderate oven twenty-five to thirty minutes.
The ingredient list has come through the scanner damaged: the sugar, salt and scalded milk quantities are simply gone, and two of the surviving numbers are mangled. What remains is a straightforward overnight yeast batter, but you will be reconstructing part of it.
- The missing quantitiesThe method calls for sugar, salt and scalded milk, none of which appear in the list. A batter of this size would plausibly take on the order of a cup of milk, a couple of tablespoons of sugar and a teaspoon of salt, but these are a reconstruction on our part, not the original text.
- "14 yeast cake"This is 1/4 yeast cake — compressed cakes of the familiar small size ran to something like 0.6 oz, though sizes varied, so a quarter is a very small amount, appropriate for a slow overnight rise. Roughly 1/2 teaspoon of instant dry yeast gives comparable behaviour; a full packet will over-ferment by morning.
- "21½ cups flour"Read this as 2 1/2 cups. Twenty-one cups would be absurd against one cup of oatmeal and a cup of milk.
- Cold cooked oatmealThis means leftover porridge, thick and set, not raw rolled oats. The recipe exists to use it up. Rub it into the flour with the fingertips as directed so it disperses; dropped in as a lump it stays as a lump.
- Iron gem pansHeavy cast-iron muffin pans, with shallow oval or round cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; butter it well, as this batter sticks.
- "Back of range"The cool rear of a coal range, a gentle warm spot for the final proof. Any draught-free place around 80F does the same. The point is that the pan warms gradually with the batter in it.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as roughly 350–375F. Twenty-five to thirty minutes is right for a full-size muffin; check at twenty if your cups are small.
- YieldAbout a dozen muffins. Best the morning they are baked.
Oatmeal muffins belong to a large family of turn-of-the-century recipes built around yesterday's porridge — the same impulse that produced bread made with cold boiled potato or rice. Oatmeal was a breakfast fixture in New England households by the 1890s, promoted heavily by the milling companies and by the era's nutritional writers, and a pot of it left standing was an ordinary daily fact. The overnight sponge here reflects the older rhythm of baking with compressed yeast: a small amount of yeast, a long slow rise while the household slept, and a hot pan waiting on the range at dawn. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries several such recipes side by side, distinguishing carefully between quick muffins raised with baking powder and these slower yeast-raised ones.