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Graham Muffins
2 cups graham flour
½ teaspoon soda
2 tablespoons sugar
¾ cup sour milk
½ teaspoon salt
½ tablespoon shortening
1 egg
Sift the flour with the sugar, salt and soda, and turn the bran back into it. Add the milk gradually, the well-beaten egg, and the melted shortening. Fill well-greased muffin-tins about twothirds full and bake in a hot oven (400°-425° F.) from twenty to twenty-five minutes.
A plain sour-milk muffin that comes together in one bowl. Two things decide whether it works: real soured milk to react with the soda, and a light hand once the liquid goes in.
- Mix as little as possibleStir only until the dry flour disappears; the batter should look lumpy. Graham flour has bran that cuts gluten strands, but overbeating still produces tough, tunnelled muffins.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, unsifted in principle, milled with the bran left in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; regular fine whole-wheat flour works but gives a smoother crumb than intended.
- "Turn the bran back into it"Sifting graham flour leaves coarse bran in the sieve. The instruction is to tip that bran back into the bowl rather than discard it, so the sifting only distributes the soda, sugar and salt evenly.
- Sour milkIn this period, milk left to sour on its own; modern pasteurised milk is not a reliable substitute, since it tends to spoil rather than sour cleanly. Use buttermilk, or add a scant tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to ¾ cup milk and let it stand five minutes. Sweet milk alone leaves the soda with no acid to work against and gives a soapy taste.
- ShorteningHalf a tablespoon is about 1½ teaspoons — very little fat, which is why these are best eaten warm. Melted butter, lard or a neutral oil all serve.
- OvenThe recipe helpfully gives its own numbers: 400-425°F. Preheat fully and grease the tins well; at this low a fat content the batter sticks.
- YieldRoughly 8 to 10 standard muffins, filled two-thirds as directed. Twenty minutes is usually enough in a modern oven — test at that point.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s and 40s, who argued that white bolted flour stripped bread of what the body needed and that coarse unsifted wheat meal was morally as well as physically better. His name outlived his movement, attaching itself to a flour and to the cracker. By the early twentieth century graham flour was simply an ordinary pantry staple, kept for variety rather than reform. The sour-milk-and-soda leavening is the older method, from a period when milk soured on the shelf as a matter of course and cooks treated it as an ingredient rather than a loss.