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Raisin Bran Muffins
1 cup bran
1 tablespoon melted fat
¾ cup flour
½ cup seeded raisins
4 teaspoons baking-powder
½ cup milk
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg
1½ tablespoons molasses
Mix and sift the dry fine ingredients, stir in the bran, add the molasses, the melted fat, raisins and the milk gradually. Then add the well-beaten egg and bake in muffin-tins in a hot oven (400°-425° F.).
A lean, fast bran muffin from the era when baking powder was sold in generous doses. Two things need attention: the leavening and the bran itself.
- Bran means branThis is plain unprocessed wheat bran (miller's bran), not a bran breakfast cereal. If you substitute flaked cereal the volume and absorbency change and the batter will be slack.
- Let the bran hydrateThe recipe adds the milk gradually and moves straight to the oven. Bran drinks liquid slowly, so stirring the bran into the milk and molasses and leaving it ten minutes gives a less gritty crumb. The batter should be thick but droppable; add a spoonful more milk if it mounds stiffly.
- Four teaspoons of baking powder is a lotWith about 1¾ cups of dry ingredients, modern double-acting powder would want roughly 2 teaspoons. Recipes of this period routinely called for more, and the tartrate and phosphate powders then on sale behaved differently from today's double-acting kind. The full four teaspoons may leave a soapy or metallic taste; consider halving it.
- Melted fat"Fat" here means butter, lard or shortening, melted and cooled slightly so it does not scramble the egg. Neutral oil works and needs no melting.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed, a job often done by hand at home, though seeded raisins were also sold ready-prepared. Ordinary seedless raisins are the direct equivalent; toss them in a little of the flour so they do not sink.
- Oven and timeThe 400–425°F given is correct for muffins. No baking time is stated: expect 18 to 20 minutes in a standard tin, until the tops spring back and a tester comes out clean.
- MixingCombine only until the flour disappears. Bran batters look coarse and lumpy at the right stage; beating them smooth makes tunnels and toughness.
- YieldAbout eight to nine standard muffins. Grease the tins well — there is only a tablespoon of fat in the whole batch and bran sticks.
Bran muffins belong to the early twentieth-century enthusiasm for "roughage," when milling byproducts that had long gone to livestock were rebranded as a health food for people; wheat bran was cheap, widely available from millers and grocers, and, by most accounts, promoted in the early decades of the century for regularity, a claim that appeared in cookbooks and advertising alike. The molasses here does double duty, supplying both the dark flavour bran demands and a moisture that plain sugar would not, a pairing carried over from older gingerbread and brown-bread baking. Butterick, publisher of dress patterns and the household magazines that went with them, carried this kind of recipe: quick breads leavened with baking powder rather than yeast, made in a single bowl, ready inside half an hour.