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Indian Meal Muffins
Two cups of Indian meal scalded with as little water as possible, one coffeecup of flour, one teacup of sweet milk, one tablespoon of shortening, one-half cup of brown sugar, a small cup of yeast; mixed over night.
A yeast-raised cornmeal muffin set as an overnight sponge, from the era before baking powder took over quick breads. The original assumes you keep liquid yeast on the shelf and know your own oven, so a few things need filling in.
- Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal, and in this period it would have been stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket meal. A medium-grind yellow cornmeal is the closest match; fine degerminated meal will give a softer, less characterful crumb.
- Scalding the mealThis is the hinge of the recipe. Pouring boiling water over the cornmeal gelatinises the starch so it absorbs liquid and does not stay gritty overnight. "As little water as possible" means just enough to damp and swell it, and it must be cooled to lukewarm before the yeast goes in or the heat will kill the yeast.
- A small cup of yeastNineteenth-century "yeast" here is liquid barm or a homemade hop-and-potato yeast, not dry granules. The recipe's "small cup" of that leaven is only roughly approximated by about a teaspoon of instant dry yeast, with the missing liquid made up in the milk.
- Cup measuresA coffeecup and a teacup were not necessarily the same vessel; a coffeecup is usually taken as near a full modern cup (8 oz) and a teacup nearer 6 oz, though neither was standardised. The recipe's casual mixing of the two is normal for the period and the dough is forgiving.
- ShorteningIn this period this means lard, beef drippings or butter, not the hydrogenated vegetable product sold under the name today. Melted butter is the easiest modern stand-in.
- No salt, no eggThe original omits both. About a teaspoon of salt is worth adding for flavour; without it the sweetness reads flat.
- Overnight rise and bakingMix at night, leave covered at cool room temperature, then beat down in the morning, fill greased gem or muffin pans two-thirds full and let them relax 20-30 minutes. The recipe gives no oven instruction at all; around 400-425F for 20-25 minutes, until browned and firm, suits this style.
- YieldThe quantities make about a dozen standard muffins. They are best warm from the pan; yeasted cornmeal goes dry by the second day.
Cornmeal was the cheap, ever-present grain of the American household kitchen, and "Indian meal" was its ordinary name from the colonial period onward, distinguishing New World maize from English wheat and rye meal. Recipes like this one sit at a turning point: chemical leavens were widely available by the 1870s, but many households still kept a jar of liquid yeast going and used it for everything from bread to buckwheat cakes to gem-pan muffins, setting the batter at bedtime so breakfast could be baked at first light. The Home Cook Book was a compiled charity cookbook of 1870s Chicago, its contents gathered from local women, which is why measurements arrive as coffeecups and teacups rather than standardised units - Fannie Farmer's level-measurement discipline was still some two decades off.