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Corn-Meal Muffins
1 cup corn-meal
1 cup milk
1 cup flour
1 egg
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons shortening
4 teaspoons baking-powder
Mix and sift the corn-meal, flour, salt and baking-powder. Add the milk gradually, then the well-beaten egg, and melted fat. Bake in well-greased muffin-pans in a hot oven (400°-425° F.).
A plain half-and-half cornmeal muffin from the era when baking powder had just settled into standard proportions. The recipe is complete as written; a few of its assumptions need translating.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons to two cups of dry ingredients is heavy by current standards, where 1 to 1½ teaspoons per cup of flour is normal. Period phosphate and tartrate powders were single-acting, releasing their gas differently from modern double-acting types, which may account for the generous measure; reduce to about 2½ teaspoons if you want to avoid a soapy or metallic edge.
- ShorteningIn American usage of this period the word means fat generally: lard, butter, drippings, or vegetable shortening. Melted butter or bacon drippings both work, and the recipe says melted, so it goes in last, after the beaten egg.
- Cornmeal grindGrind varied by mill, and roller-milled degerminated meal was in circulation alongside stone-ground. Standard fine or medium yellow cornmeal gives a good result; stone-ground coarse meal will be gritty unless you scald it with the milk first and let it stand ten minutes.
- MixingThe hinge of any quick bread. Combine only until the dry streaks disappear. Overmixing develops gluten and gives you tunnels and a tough crumb. The flour, meal, salt and baking powder are sifted together first so the leavening is evenly distributed.
- OvenThe recipe helpfully gives the number: 400-425F, which is what "hot oven" meant. Use the lower end for standard muffin cups, the higher for smaller pans.
- TimingNone is given. Expect 18 to 22 minutes for standard muffins, 12 to 15 for miniature ones; they are done when the tops spring back and a tester comes out clean.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 standard muffins. Grease the pans generously as directed, or use paper liners; there is no sugar in the batter and the muffins are lean.
Cornmeal breads leavened with chemical raising agents belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, when commercial baking powder made it easy to skip both yeast and the older practice of beating eggs into a batter for lift. Recipes like this one split the dry measure evenly between cornmeal and wheat flour, a middle ground between older all-corn breads, which are dense and crumbly, and the lighter wheat muffin, though the reason for the ratio is not stated. The Butterick book was published by the pattern company as part of a broad line of domestic guides aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its dress patterns, and its quick-bread chapter reflects that audience: short ingredient lists and standard cup measures. The recipe leads with "hot oven" and gives the Fahrenheit range only parenthetically.