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Bran Muffins
Follow the recipe for making Bran Bread, baking twenty-five minutes in deep muffin pans oiled with Mazola.
A one-line recipe that leans entirely on the bran bread formula printed elsewhere in the book. What it does supply — pan, fat and time — is enough to work back to a modern method.
- It is a cross-referenceYou need the book's Bran Bread batter to make these at all. Any wet-into-dry bran loaf batter will behave the same way in muffin pans.
- No oven temperature is givenThe original assumes you know your range. A hot oven of roughly 400F suits muffins of this type, and the recipe's own twenty-five minutes is a reasonable guide at that heat; if the bread recipe calls for a cooler oven, bake cooler and start checking at twenty-five minutes.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now. The brand-name instruction reads like a manufacturer's promotional volume rather than neutral technique; any neutral oil greases the pans identically.
- Bran means branAt the time this meant loose, unsweetened wheat bran from the mill, not a sugared breakfast cereal. Buy plain wheat bran or miller's bran; flaked cereals will collapse into paste.
- Let the batter standBran absorbs liquid slowly. Ten to fifteen minutes of rest before filling the pans keeps the crumb from turning gritty and dry.
- Deep muffin pansPeriod pans, in tin or cast iron, tended to straight, deep wells. A standard modern muffin tin works; fill the cups two-thirds and expect a shorter bake than a deeper pan would need.
- MixingStir only until the dry ingredients are damp. Bran batters tunnel and toughen when beaten smooth.
- YieldA single loaf's worth of batter should give roughly a dozen standard muffins, depending on the size of the bread recipe. Test with a straw or skewer at the centre; the tops brown before the middles set.
This book belongs to a genre that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century: the cookbook issued by a food manufacturer to demonstrate its product. The repeated instruction to oil pans "with Mazola" suggests as much, corn oil being then a relatively new refined product competing with butter and lard in American baking. Bran itself was having a moment. Milled wheat bran had long been cheap stock feed, but late-nineteenth-century health reform and, by the 1920s, an energetic advertising campaign for bran as a remedy for constipation moved it onto the breakfast and luncheon table. The terse cross-reference is typical of these promotional volumes, which stretched a handful of base formulas into a long table of contents.