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Olympic Breakfast Dishes (Muffins cups Olympic Flour)
Muffins 2 cups Olympic Flour 21/2 2½ teaspoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt tablespoon sugar 1 1 cup milk 1 1 egg tablespoon melted butter Mix and sift the dry ingredients; mix beaten egg and milk; add to flour. Add melted butter and beat to a smooth batter. Bake in buttered gem pans in moderate oven.
A plain milk-and-egg muffin batter of the kind that filled the back pages of flour-company booklets. The proportions are standard enough that the method matters more than the arithmetic.
- Do not overmixThe instruction to "beat to a smooth batter" reflects 1900s practice and will give you tough, tunnelled muffins. Stir only until the flour disappears; a few lumps are correct.
- Moderate ovenThe book specifies only a "moderate oven," which in period usage generally meant about 350-375F. Many modern bakers prefer 400-425F for muffins to get a better dome. Around twenty minutes is usually enough for standard cups.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan with rounded or oval cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; grease it well, since these have only a tablespoon of fat and no paper liners were assumed.
- Olympic FlourA Pacific Northwest flour brand promoted in booklets like this one. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the substitute.
- Baking powderBaking powders of the period varied in strength and some were single-acting. With a modern double-acting powder you can use the printed amount or slightly less.
- QuantitiesThe ingredient line as printed is garbled, with figures repeated and fractions displaced. Read as: 2 cups flour, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 cup milk, 1 egg and 1 tablespoon melted butter.
- YieldTwelve small muffins, or nine of modern size. They are barely sweet and were meant to be eaten hot with butter, not treated as cake.
This comes from a promotional cookbook of the sort milling companies distributed by the thousand between about 1890 and 1930, advertising dressed up as instruction. "Olympic" was a Northwest flour brand, and the booklet was titled "Olympic Breakfast Dishes." The recipe itself is the basic American quick-bread muffin that spread with chemical leavening in the second half of the nineteenth century: no yeast, no waiting, mixed and baked between the time the stove was hot and the time the family sat down.