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Zante Muffins
1/2 cup butter 2 cups corn meal ¾ cup sugar 1 cup flour 3 eggs. 1 teaspoon salt 1½ cups milk 5 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 cup currants Cream the butter; add sugar, gradually, eggs well beaten, and milk; then add dry ingredients mixed and sifted, and currants. Bake in buttered individual tins.
A cornmeal muffin with dried currants, from a period when the oven temperature was left to the cook's judgment. The batter is thin and mixes quickly, so have the tins buttered before you start.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was standard in Farmer's day. Muffins of this type belong in a hot oven, 400-425F, for 20 to 25 minutes.
- The sugar quantityThe sugar reads as 3/4 cup, which is consistent with the rest of the proportions. Anything larger would overwhelm three cups of meal and flour.
- Zante currantsThese are not related to fresh currants; they are small dried grapes, sold today simply as dried currants. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before adding so they distribute rather than sink.
- Corn mealUse a fine or medium yellow meal. Coarse stone-ground meal gives a gritty crumb here unless you let the batter stand 10 minutes to hydrate before filling the tins.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons for three cups of dry ingredients is heavy by current practice and can leave a faint metallic edge. Four teaspoons of a modern double-acting powder raises these adequately.
- Individual tinsA standard 12-cup muffin pan stands in for the old gem or muffin irons. Fill each about two-thirds full.
- YieldMakes 12 to 15 muffins. Best eaten the day they are baked; cornmeal batters dry out quickly.
The name points to Zakynthos, the Ionian island the English long called Zante, which shipped the tiny dried grapes that came to be known as Zante currants. By the time Fannie Farmer was writing at the Boston Cooking School in the 1890s, those currants were a familiar cheap, keepable dried fruit in American groceries, and they appear in a number of her recipes for buns, puddings and cakes. Cookbooks of the period often took their titles from a distinguishing ingredient. The recipe also uses cornmeal alongside wheat flour, here two parts meal to one of flour, a combination common in New England baking.