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Plain Muffins
3½ teaspoons baking powder teaspoon salt 1 egg 1 cup milk Sift the dry ingredients, add gradually the eggs well beaten, milk and fat melted. Grease muffin tins; fill two-thirds full. Bake about twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven not over 350°F. Half a cup less of milk may be used and one cup of berries added to the mixture. 1 cup flour teaspoon salt 3½ teaspoons baking powder
A basic quick-bread muffin of the 1920s household type, leavened entirely with baking powder and mixed by the muffin method. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete and internally inconsistent, so read the notes below before measuring anything.
- The ingredient list does not balanceFlour appears once as one cup, while the baking powder is given twice as 3½ teaspoons. That is a high figure against a single cup of flour; period books more often give around 2 teaspoons per cup. The printed proportions may belong to a larger batch, but the text does not say.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for melted fat, but no quantity for it is given anywhere in the text. Sugar is not mentioned at all, in either the list or the method; plain muffins of this type were sometimes made with little or no sugar, so it is not certain any was intended.
- SaltThe salt is written without its fraction. For one cup of flour the usual figure is ¼ to ½ teaspoon.
- Moderate ovenThe book states its own number, 350°F, which is unusually helpful. Many muffin recipes of the same date go hotter, 400 to 425°F, for a higher dome and quicker set; 350°F gives a paler, flatter muffin over the full twenty-five minutes.
- MixingBeaten egg, milk and melted fat go into the sifted dry ingredients and are stirred only until the flour is damp. A batter beaten smooth develops gluten and bakes into tunnels and a tough crumb.
- Muffin tinsGrease the cups and fill two-thirds full, as directed. A standard twelve-cup tin holds roughly double a one-cup-flour batch, so expect about six muffins from the recipe as printed.
- The berry variationReducing the milk by half a cup and folding in a cup of berries leaves half a cup of milk to the one cup of flour. Toss the berries in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
Plain muffins are the workhorse of the American quick-bread repertoire, made possible by commercial baking powder, which spread through home kitchens from the second half of the nineteenth century and let a cook raise a batter in minutes rather than hours. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed its cook book free to policyholders as part of a broad public-health campaign, and the plainness here is deliberate: little sugar, little fat, quick to assemble, and easy for a household cook to scale. Grouping muffins with cereals, batters and doughs reflects the period's habit of teaching one basic batter and then listing variations, which is exactly what the berry note at the end of this entry is.