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Bran Muffins
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 3/4 teaspoon salt 2 cups bran 3 tablespoons sugar 1 egg 2 tablespoons melted fat About 1½ cups sweet milk Sift together the flour, salt and baking powder, blend with this the bran, and add to these dry ingredients the mixture of milk, beaten egg, sugar and fat. Have a thick, but very moist batter. Bake in greased muffin pans in a moderate oven about 1/2 an hour. cup cornmeal 1 cup flour
The ingredient list as printed has been scrambled by the typesetter: the flour and cornmeal quantities have migrated to the end, and the salt and baking powder called for in the method never appear at all. Read the method first and reconstruct the list before you start.
- The missing leaveningThe instructions say to sift flour, salt and baking powder together, but no amounts are given for the last two. For 2 cups of bran plus 1 cup flour and ½ cup cornmeal, standard practice of the period would be roughly 4 teaspoons baking powder and ½ teaspoon salt; the original is genuinely silent, so treat any figure as a reconstruction.
- The stray last line"cup cornmeal 1 cup flour" belongs at the top of the ingredients. The leading quantity for the cornmeal has been lost in the printing and cannot be recovered from the page; ½ cup is a reasonable working guess, not a reading.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because sour milk or buttermilk was equally common in the pantry and would have demanded soda instead of baking powder. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Melted fatLard, bacon drippings or butter, whichever was to hand. Melted butter or a neutral oil both work; the two tablespoons are a small amount for this volume of batter, so grease the tins well.
- BranPlain unprocessed wheat bran, not a ready-sweetened breakfast cereal. It is thirsty — let the batter stand five minutes before filling the tins and it will thicken noticeably, which is why the direction says thick but very moist.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350–375F. The term dates from ranges without a dial, where 'moderate' meant the middle of the working heat range.
- An hour is too longMuffins of this size are done in 20 to 25 minutes at 350F; a full hour will dry them out. Whatever the original timing was based on, test with a skewer at 20 minutes.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins. They stale fast, as anything with this much bran and little fat does, and are best the day they are made.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and handed out free to policyholders -- one of several booklets the company distributed as part of a public-health campaign that also covered ventilation, infant feeding and tuberculosis. Bran was a considerable dietary enthusiasm of the 1910s and 1920s, promoted for what the literature of the day called regularity, and the milling industry was by then able to sell the bran fraction as a product in its own right rather than as feed. The recipe's austerity -- three tablespoons of sugar and two of fat for a dozen muffins -- suits a hygienic rather than a pleasure-seeking cookbook, and cornmeal alongside wheat flour was a common way of stretching white flour.