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Muffins
Mrs. W. H. Low.
Good.
One tablespoon of butter, two tablespoons sugar, two eggs-stir all together; add one cup of sweet milk, three teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder, flour to make a stiff batter. Bake twenty minutes in a quick oven.
A one-line community-cookbook muffin, written for a cook who already knew what a stiff batter looked like. The only real decisions left to you are the flour quantity and the oven.
- Quick ovenRead that as 425-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits a standard 12-cup muffin tin; the batter is meant to hit a hot oven so the baking powder lifts fast.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand of the period, and a name still sold in Canada. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes at the same measure; three teaspoons is generous by current standards, which may reflect the different strength of period powders.
- Flour to make a stiff batterRoughly 2 to 2 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour with one cup of milk. Aim for a batter that mounds on the spoon and drops reluctantly, not one that pours.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which were more commonly paired with saleratus or soda.
- MixingThe instruction to "stir all together" predates the modern muffin method, but the principle still holds once flour goes in: stir only until the dry streaks disappear. Overworking gives tough muffins with tunnels.
- One tablespoon of butterVery lean by modern muffin standards, closer to a quick bread than a bakery muffin. Cream it with the sugar and eggs as written; it will not emulsify smoothly at that ratio, and that is expected.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 muffins in a standard tin, or the same batter baked in cast-iron gem pans, which were in use in this period.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, making it one of the earliest and most successful Canadian charity cookbooks. Its format explains much about this entry: recipes were donated by name and printed largely as received, and the bare "Good." after Mrs. Low's name reads as a verdict on the recipe, though whether it came from the contributor or from the compilers is not clear. The named brand is telling too. Cook's Friend was one of the chemical leaveners gaining ground in Canadian kitchens in the 1870s alongside the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method. A muffin like this, mixed and baked inside half an hour, is a product of that shift.