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Corn Muffins with Dates
1 cup white corn-meal
1 cup flour
2 tablespoons brown sugar
4 teaspoons baking-powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg
2 tablespoons shortening
½ cup chopped dates
1¼ cups milk
Mix the corn-meal, sugar, salt and melted shortening. Scald the milk, pour it over the mixture, and let it stand until the meal swells. When cool, add the flour sifted with the baking-powder, the well-beaten egg and the dates. Beat thoroughly, and bake in greased muffin-tins in a hot oven (400°-425° F.).
A straightforward muffin batter with one unusual step: the cornmeal is scalded before mixing, which changes the texture rather than the flavor.
- The scald is the pointPouring hot milk over the meal hydrates the starch so the muffins are moist rather than gritty. The original simply says to let it stand until the meal swells and to add the rest when cool; allow it a quarter of an hour or so, and do not rush it, since if the batter is still warm when the baking powder goes in the leavening will spend itself before the tins reach the oven.
- OvenThe original gives "a hot oven (400°-425° F.)," so the number is there to be taken at face value. Use 400F in a modern oven with dark tins, 425F in light metal or if you want a stronger dome.
- White corn-mealWhite meal is the Southern preference, milder than yellow; yellow works with no adjustment beyond colour. A coarse stone-ground meal will give a more noticeably grainy crumb, though the scald is precisely the step that helps soften it.
- ShorteningThis means lard or a vegetable shortening; Crisco was only just appearing on the market and would not yet have been the default. Melted butter is the easiest substitute. Note that the fat is melted and mixed with the dry meal before scalding, not creamed.
- Baking-powderFour teaspoons to two cups of dry ingredients is high by modern standards. Three teaspoons of a current double-acting powder will give ample lift.
- DatesChop and toss them with a spoonful of the sifted flour so they separate in the batter instead of sinking as a mass. Deglet Noor hold their shape better than Medjool, which turn to paste when stirred warm.
- Yield and timingMakes about 12 standard muffins, filling the cups two-thirds full. Expect 18-22 minutes; they are done when the tops spring back and a tester comes out clean of batter, allowing for sticky date.
Corn muffins with dates sit at the junction of two American habits: cornbread, which needed no introduction in 1911, and the dried fruit that had recently become cheap and reliable. California date cultivation was still young at the time this book appeared, but imported dates from North Africa and the Persian Gulf had been arriving in American groceries in pressed blocks for decades, and cookbooks of the period put them into everything from bread pudding to salad. The scalded-meal method is older than either, generally traced to the same reasoning behind mush and spoonbread -- hot liquid was the surest way to tame a coarse home-ground meal. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published this book as part of a broad push into household advice for the middle-class woman running a kitchen without staff, which is why the instructions are compact and the oven is described as "a hot oven (400-425 F.)," the number supplementing the older term rather than replacing it.