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Rye Muffins II
1 1/4 cups rye meal. 1 1/4 cups flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup molasses 1¼ cups milk 1 egg 1 tablespoon melted butter Mix and bake as Graham Muffins II, adding molasses with milk.
A cross-referenced recipe of the kind that fills the quick-bread chapters of this book: the flour line has dropped out in printing, and the method lives one entry earlier under Graham Muffins II. A few notes before you mix.
- The missing flourAs printed, no flour or rye meal is listed, which cannot be right for a muffin batter. The companion Graham recipes in this section run to roughly two cups of meal and flour combined — commonly one cup rye meal to one cup white flour — but the exact amount is genuinely absent here rather than something to be deduced with confidence.
- Rye meal is not rye flourNineteenth-century rye meal was coarsely ground whole rye. Modern dark or whole rye flour is the closest match; light rye is sifted and will give a paler, blander muffin.
- OvenThe book gives no temperatures; a "hot oven" is usually read today as about 425F. Twenty to twenty-five minutes in a greased twelve-cup tin, until the tops spring back.
- Gem pansThe book's muffins are baked in gem pans, commonly cast iron, greased before the batter went in; preheating them was common advice, though nothing here specifies it. A well-greased metal muffin tin does the same job; paper liners may stick to a molasses batter.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cane molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than what was sold as cooking molasses in 1896 and will overwhelm the rye.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons for about two cups of flour is generous by current practice but in line with this book, whose readers would have been using single-acting powder. With modern double-acting powder about three teaspoons should be enough.
- MixingCombine wet and dry only until the flour disappears. Rye has little gluten, but overbeating a batter this wet still produces tunnels and a tough crumb.
- YieldAbout twelve standard muffins. Best eaten warm; the rye and molasses should help them stay moist.
Rye was the everyday bread grain of New England long before wheat flour became cheap and universal — rye-and-Indian loaves, brown bread, and rye drop cakes were colonial staples, and molasses arrived on the same coastal trade routes that supplied the region's rum distilleries. By the time Fannie Farmer compiled the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in 1896, white flour had displaced rye at most tables, and recipes like this one survive as a genteel, quick-bread echo of an older habit: the dark grain and the molasses together produce something close in flavor to Boston brown bread, but leavened with baking powder and out of the oven in half an hour rather than steamed for three. The chapter's heavy reliance on cross-references — "mix and bake as Graham Muffins II" — reflects the book's origin as a teaching text, where students had already drilled the muffin method and needed only the variation.