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Columbia Muffins
3 tablespoonfuls sugar 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 egg 1½ cupfuls milk 1 teaspoonful salt 3½ teaspoonfuls baking powder 3½ cupfuls sifted flour Sift flour, salt, and baking powder together. Cream Crisco and sugar, add egg well beaten, then milk and flour mixture. Divide into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake twenty-five minutes in hot oven. Sufficient for twenty muffins. 1 cupful cornmeal
A plain milk muffin from Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbook, written when shortening was the new thing and muffin tins were called gem pans. A few of the printed figures are garbled and need a decision before you start.
- The baking powder figureThe original reads "31/½ teaspoonfuls," which is a typesetting casualty. Against 3½ cups of flour, 3½ teaspoons is the coherent reading and lands squarely on the usual ratio of about a teaspoon per cup.
- The stray cup of cornmealThe line "1 cupful cornmeal" hangs off the end with no instruction attached. It cannot be used as printed; it may be the opening ingredient of the following recipe caught at a page break, or the head of a corn-muffin variation. Either way, ignore it unless you choose to swap a cup of the flour for it.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperature. "Hot oven" is usually taken today as somewhere around 400-425F. At the upper end check at 18-20 minutes; the full twenty-five suits the cooler end of the range and a heavy pan.
- Gem pansStandard muffin tins. Gem pans of the period came in cast iron as well as tin, with cups generally smaller than a modern tin's, so twenty muffins from this batter means small ones — expect twelve to fourteen from a standard 12-cup pan, filled two-thirds.
- Crisco and CriscoingCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, and any solid shortening works. "Criscoed and floured" simply means greased and floured; paper liners do the same job.
- MixingCreaming shortening and sugar is the method here, but once the flour goes in, stop as soon as it is damp. A lumpy batter bakes into a tender muffin; a smooth one bakes into a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- The liquid runs shortA cup and a half of milk against three and a half cups of flour gives a stiff, scoop-and-drop batter rather than a pourable one. That is consistent with the muffins of the period; add a splash more milk if your flour is thirsty.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's book-length argument for a product it had launched two years earlier: a solid, shelf-stable cooking fat made from cottonseed oil by hydrogenation, sold as cleaner and more economical than lard or butter. Nearly every recipe in it is an ordinary American standard rewritten with Crisco in place of whatever fat a cook would previously have used, which is why the shortening appears here as both an ingredient and a verb — "Criscoed" gem pans. Muffins of this kind, quick-raised with baking powder and baked in cast-iron gem pans, were a staple of the American breakfast table from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and the name "Columbia" was a patriotic label attached freely to dishes, flour brands and stove models in the same era rather than a mark of any particular origin.