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Graham Muffins
Two cups of sour milk, two table-spoons brown sugar, a little salt, one tea-spoon soda, sufficient Graham flour to make moderately stiff. If not convenient to use sour milk, use sweet, adding cream of tartar.-Mrs. H. B. Sherman.
A three-line quick bread from the era when muffins were leavened by the reaction of soured milk and soda rather than by baking powder. The blanks the recipe leaves — flour quantity, oven, time — are the parts worth pinning down.
- The hinge: mix and bake immediatelySoda hitting sour milk begins releasing carbon dioxide at once, and there is no second leavening to fall back on. Have the pan greased and the oven hot before the liquid meets the flour, and get the batter into the oven within a minute or two.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered raw milk, which is not what happens to pasteurised milk left out — that just spoils. Use buttermilk, or 2 cups milk with 2 tablespoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left 10 minutes.
- The sweet-milk alternativeThe usual period substitution is about 2 teaspoons cream of tartar to each 1 teaspoon soda, sifted through the flour, with sweet milk in place of sour. That, in effect, is homemade baking powder; roughly 3 to 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder in place of both the soda and the cream of tartar does the same work.
- Graham flourWhole wheat flour, coarsely milled and including the bran and germ. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing; standard fine whole wheat flour gives a smoother, less characteristic crumb. Add the flour gradually to the 2 cups of liquid until the batter is moderately stiff -- likely somewhere around 3 to 4 cups.
- "Moderately stiff"Thicker than a pancake batter, thin enough to drop from a spoon in a lump rather than pour. Whole wheat absorbs liquid as it stands, so err on the loose side; overmixing to work in the last of the flour toughens it.
- Oven and panThe recipe gives neither oven nor time. A hot oven, in the region of 400 to 425F, in greased muffin tins or cast-iron gem pans; bake about 18 to 22 minutes, until the tops spring back.
- YieldAbout a dozen standard muffins. They are best within an hour of baking; whole wheat quick breads with no fat in them stale quickly.
- Salt and sugar"A little salt" is about 1/2 teaspoon. Two tablespoons of brown sugar in a dozen muffins is barely sweet by current expectation; they would likely have been eaten with butter or preserves.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached that unbolted whole wheat, plain living and home baking were the antidote to the refined white flour and commercial bakeries of the age. By the time The Dixie Cook Book appeared late in the century his particular moral fervour had faded, but the flour kept his name and had settled into ordinary American kitchens as a wholesome everyday staple — a breakfast-table item rather than a cause. The recipe's assumption that sour milk is simply on hand marks it as pre-refrigeration cooking: milk clabbered as a matter of course, and soda-leavened breads were the household's way of using it. The attribution to Mrs. H. B. Sherman is typical of the book's method, which gathered contributions by name from a network of women rather than presenting a single authorial voice.