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Cereal Muffins
1 1/2 cups flour. 1/2 cup wheatena or other cereal. 3/4 cup milk. 3 teaspoonfuls bakingpowder cup wheatena or other cereal cup milk 1 egg 1 tablespoonful butter 1 tablespoonful sugar teaspoonful salt 0 Sift flour, measure it, and sift again with bakingpowder, salt, and sugar. Break up the wheatena and thin carefully with milk; beat egg and add to it, stirring all into the dry materials. Add the butter melted, and put into buttered muffin-tins. 1/2 teaspoonful salt.
Bake in quick oven from twenty to thirty minutes.
Other cereals may be used in the same proportion.
A standard muffin batter stretched with yesterday's cooked breakfast cereal. The method is sound; the ingredient list as printed is missing its flour line and several of its fractions, so treat the quantities below as guidance rather than transcription.
- The missing measurementsNo quantity of flour is given, and the cup amounts for cereal and milk, and the spoon amount for salt, have lost their fractions; butter and sugar are printed as a tablespoonful each. A muffin batter of this type normally runs about 2 cups flour, 1 cup cooked cereal, 1 cup milk, and a scant teaspoon salt; 3 teaspoons baking powder to 2 cups flour is a common ratio and is consistent with that reading.
- WheatenaA roasted whole-wheat farina, still sold and still cooked as a hot porridge. Any leftover cooked cereal of similar texture works: oatmeal, cream of wheat, cornmeal mush, or leftover rice porridge. It must be cooked and cooled, not dry cereal from the box.
- Breaking up the cerealThis is the hinge. Cold cereal sets into a solid mass, and if it goes into the batter in lumps it stays in lumps. Work the milk into it a little at a time with a fork or whisk until it is a smooth slurry before anything else joins it.
- Quick ovenNo temperature is given in the book; the term is usually taken as somewhere around 400 to 425F. The recipe's twenty to thirty minutes spans different pans, the longer end suiting a deep gem pan or a cooler oven.
- MixingStir only until the dry flour disappears. A batter carrying cooked cereal is already heavier than plain muffin batter, and overworking it gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- ButterMelt it and let it cool slightly before adding, or it will set into flecks against the cold milk-and-cereal mixture.
- YieldAbout twelve standard muffins. Best within a few hours of baking; the cereal keeps them moist but they turn gummy by the next day.
Left-over cookery books of the early twentieth century were built on the assumption that a household cooked a pot of hot cereal every morning and rarely finished it. Wheatena, a roasted whole-wheat porridge whose origins are generally traced to the late nineteenth century in the United States, was one of the branded cereals often said to have made this a daily problem in middle-class kitchens, and one common answer was to fold the cold remainder into a batter. Cooked grain in a muffin does real work beyond thrift: it adds moisture and softens the crumb, which is why the same principle survives today in oatmeal and rice muffins. The author's closing line, that other cereals may be used in the same proportion, is the whole logic of the genre in a sentence, treating the leftover as a category rather than an ingredient.