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Jelly Corn Muffins
Use the recipe for corn-meal muffins. Fill greased muffin-tins one-fourth full, put a teaspoon of jelly on the top of the batter in each cup, cover the jelly with more batter and bake in a hot oven (400°-425° F.) fifteen or twenty minutes.
A filled variation that depends on a base recipe printed elsewhere in the book. The technique is sound; the only real difficulty is keeping the jelly where you put it.
- The base batterThe intended base is the book's own corn-meal muffin recipe, printed elsewhere and not repeated here. A typical modern cornmeal muffin formula runs roughly 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup flour, 2-3 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, 2 tbsp sugar, 1 egg, 1 cup milk and 3 tbsp melted fat, but that is a substitute, not the book's list. Period recipes generally assumed stone-ground meal rather than the degerminated meal now sold, and the two can behave differently, so hold back a little milk if the batter seems thin.
- The hinge: seal the jelly completelyThe second layer of batter must cover the jelly to the edges of the cup, or it will boil out and weld the muffin to the tin. Drop the top batter in blobs around the jelly rather than directly on it and let it spread.
- "One-fourth full" is conservativeA quarter of batter, a teaspoon of jelly, then batter to about two-thirds or three-quarters overall. Overfilling is the usual cause of a burst top.
- Choose a stiff jellyA firm, well-set jelly — currant, crabapple, quince — holds its shape. Loose jams and modern low-sugar preserves are wetter and more likely to migrate through the crumb and scorch.
- Oven temperatureThe book's 400-425°F is right for muffins and matches modern practice. Fifteen minutes is usually enough for a standard 12-cup tin; twenty suits larger cups.
- GreasingGrease the cups generously, including the rims, since escaped sugar caramelizes hard. Paper liners are a reasonable substitute and make lost jelly a non-issue.
- Yield and servingYield depends on the base recipe; a typical cornmeal muffin batter fills roughly a dozen standard cups. They are best warm — the jelly centre firms and dulls as it cools, and they do not keep well past the day they are baked.
Cornmeal muffins were a fixture of American breakfast tables long before this book appeared, and the trick of hiding a spoonful of preserve in the middle belongs to a broader family of "surprise" baked goods found in early twentieth-century household manuals — filled cupcakes, jam-centred gems, doughnuts with a dab of jelly inside. The Butterick book, published by the pattern company alongside its other domestic advice, is organised for a cook working from a small set of base recipes and ringing changes on them; note that this entry does not repeat the muffin formula at all but simply points back to it. That editorial habit suggests a book designed around a handful of reliable batters to be varied with whatever was on the pantry shelf — in a household that put up its own currant or crabapple jelly, a use for the jars.