Home › Breads, Biscuit and Rolls › Corn Muffins
Corn Muffins
Two teacups of Indian meal; two teacups of flour; two eggs; piece of butter size of an egg; three teaspoons of baking powder; one pint of milk. Sift the meal and flour, melt the butter and stir all together.
A plain, quickly mixed batter of the kind that filled American breakfast tables before boxed mixes. Two things need attention: the cup size and the missing salt.
- TeacupsA teacup in American books of this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though many writers used it interchangeably with a full cup. Either reading works here; at 3/4 cup each you get a thicker batter, at a full cup each a distinctly loose one. The measurement is genuinely ambiguous, so judge by the batter, which should pour thickly rather than mound.
- Indian mealCornmeal. Nineteenth-century Indian meal was stone-ground and coarser than modern degerminated supermarket meal; a medium-grind yellow cornmeal is the closest match. Fine-ground meal will give a smoother, cakier muffin.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. This is a standard shorthand in the period.
- No salt, no sugarThe original lists neither. Add about a teaspoon of salt unless you are using salted butter and want the muffins genuinely plain. Sugar is optional; this recipe calls for none.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for the three to four cups of dry ingredients (depending on which cup size you adopt) is at or a little below the usual rate for modern double-acting powder. Sift it with the meal and flour rather than adding it to the wet mixture.
- OvenThe recipe gives none. Bake at 400"F for 18 to 22 minutes, until the tops are set and lightly browned and a tester comes out clean. Corn batters benefit from a hot, well-greased pan going into a hot oven.
- Mixing"Stir all together" means exactly that m briefly. Overworking the wheat flour toughens the crumb; stop while a few streaks of dry meal remain.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 standard muffins, depending on which cup size you adopt. The batter also bakes well in a shallow pan as cornbread, cut in squares.
"Indian meal" is the older American name for maize meal, used to distinguish it from "meal" or "flour" made from wheat, and it survived in cookbooks well into the twentieth century. Mixing cornmeal half-and-half with wheat flour, as here, was a common compromise: cornmeal alone gives a crumbly, gritty bread, while the wheat supplies enough gluten to hold a muffin together and take a rise from chemical leavening. That leavening is the modern touch in an otherwise old formula -- baking powder became cheap and reliable in American kitchens only in the later nineteenth century, replacing the saleratus-and-sour-milk method that earlier corn breads relied on. The book itself comes from the Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and women's magazines, which issued household manuals as part of the same business of instructing the American housekeeper.