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Cornmeal Muffins
One-quarter pound wheat flour, half pound cornmeal, half ounce powdered sugar, half ounce good butter, half pint cold milk, half ounce baking powder, half teaspoon salt and one whole raw egg.
Place all these articles in a basin and carefully mix with the hand until thoroughly thickened, which will require about six minutes. Lightly butter the interior of six oval corn-bread or muffin moulds. Place the preparation into the moulds up to three-quarters of their height. Lay them on a baking tin and bake in the hot oven for twenty minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A hotel-kitchen formula given in weights rather than cups, with a batter far stiffer than most modern cornbread. A few conversions and one correction to the mixing make it behave.
- The weights in cupsA quarter pound of wheat flour is about 1 cup; half a pound of cornmeal is about 1 1/2 cups. Half an ounce of sugar is a generous tablespoon, half an ounce of butter is 1 tablespoon, and half a pint of milk is 1 cup.
- Baking powderHalf an ounce is roughly 3 teaspoons, which is high but not unreasonable for 12 ounces of dry ingredients. Fresh double-acting powder at that level is plenty; more than that can leave a metallic edge.
- The batter will be very stiffOne cup of milk against 12 ounces of flour and meal gives a paste, not a pourable batter. The preparation is placed into the moulds rather than poured, so the stiffness may be deliberate, but the result is dense. Adding another quarter to half cup of milk gives a muffin closer to modern expectations.
- Do not mix six minutesThe single instruction worth ignoring. Working wheat flour that long develops gluten and toughens the crumb. Combine the dry ingredients, add the milk, egg and softened butter, and stir just until no dry meal shows -- under a minute.
- The butterHalf an ounce of cold butter will not disperse into a stiff batter by hand. Melt it and add it with the milk, or rub it into the dry ingredients first.
- Hot ovenTake that as 425F. Twenty minutes suits small oval corn-stick moulds; standard muffin cups of the same fill will want 18-22 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- The mouldsThe recipe says only "oval corn-bread or muffin moulds"; cast-iron corn-stick pans of the kind still made are one plausible candidate, as are plain oval individual moulds. Butter them, and preheating an empty iron pan gives a crisper shell. Ordinary muffin tins work but give a softer crust.
- Yield and servingSix large sticks or muffins, or about eight standard muffins. The folded napkin on the hot dish is period service -- it absorbs steam so the bottoms do not sweat.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) is his attempt to set down the dishes of every cuisine he could reach, American ones included. That accounts for the odd register here: cornmeal, the most thoroughly American of grains, weighed out in pounds and ounces and finished with the napkin service of a French dining room. Corn-stick moulds of cast iron, cast in rows of ribbed ears, were common household equipment by the late nineteenth century, and a batter this stiff makes sense in them -- it holds the shape of the mould and browns hard against the hot metal rather than spreading. By this date baking powder appears to have been the usual leavening in such breads, which may be why a single egg does so little work in the formula.