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Muffins
2 cups flour
1 cup milk
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons melted shorten- 4 teaspoons baking-powder ing
Mix and sift the flour, salt, sugar and baking-powder. Add the milk gradually, the well-beaten egg and melted fat. Pour into well-greased muffin-tins, filling the tins two-thirds full. Bake in a hot oven (400°-425° F.) from fifteen to twenty-five minutes.
A plain baking-powder muffin, and one of the few early-century recipes that gives an actual oven temperature. The batter is thin by modern standards and depends entirely on being handled as little as possible.
- Do not beat the batterThe recipe says only "mix," but muffin batters of this type do best with a light hand: stir only until the flour is damp and lumpy. A smooth, over-worked batter develops gluten and tends to give tunnels, peaks and a tough crumb.
- OvenThe original's 400-425°F still holds. Use 400°F for a softer top, 425°F for more spring and colour. Fifteen to eighteen minutes is usually enough for standard tins; twenty-five suggests larger or gem-style pans.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is heavy by current practice. Period recipes often carried more leavening than modern ones, and single-acting powders that weakened in storage may be part of the reason. Modern double-acting powder at 2 to 3 teaspoons gives ample lift.
- ShorteningHere it means any melted fat — butter, lard or a vegetable shortening. Melted butter is the best-tasting choice; let it cool slightly so it does not cook the egg on contact.
- FlourPeriod all-purpose flour was often milled from softer wheat than much of today's. If the muffins come out tough, try replacing a quarter of the flour with cake flour, or use a soft Southern-style flour.
- Greasing the tinsGrease means grease; paper liners were not yet in general household use. A well-greased tin gives the crisp brown sides the recipe assumes, where liners give a paler, softer muffin.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins, or 8 to 9 large ones. Fill two-thirds full as directed — fuller and they mushroom over the rim.
- ServingIntended to be eaten hot, within the hour. They stale quickly, having no fat-rich or sugar-rich crumb to hold moisture.
This is the American baking-powder muffin at its most basic — the template on which blueberry, bran, corn and date variants were all built. Chemical leavening made the type possible: before reliable baking powder came into general household use in the second half of the nineteenth century, a "muffin" in English usage usually meant the yeast-raised griddle muffin still sold as an English muffin. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a broad domestic readership, prints the plainest possible version and then lets the cook add to it. The inclusion of a specific Fahrenheit range rather than the older "hot oven" may be a small marker of date — it suggests, though one can only infer it, that gas and electric ranges with oven thermometers were becoming common enough that a publisher could assume readers had numbers to work with.