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Golden Corn Muffins
1 cupful flour. 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful yellow cornmeal 3 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 cupful milk 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful salt 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, add eggs well beaten and milk. Then stir in slowly dry ingredients which have been sifted together three times. Divide into greased gem pans and bake in moderately hot oven twenty-five minutes.
Sufficient for twelve muffins.
A straightforward quick bread from Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco booklet, with one quirk in the ingredient list worth noticing before you start.
- No flour is listedAs printed, the only dry bulk is one cup of cornmeal, which gives a very dense, crumbly muffin. Many period corn muffin formulas pair the cornmeal with wheat flour, and the omission here may be a printer's slip; adding 1 cup of all-purpose flour produces a lighter muffin.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan with shallow oval or round cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; preheat it with a little fat in each cup if you want the crisp crust the iron gave.
- "Moderately hot oven"Roughly 375-400F in period usage. Twenty-five minutes is plausible at that temperature, but check earlier, as an all-cornmeal batter may set sooner.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening substitutes directly. Two tablespoons is a lean amount of fat for a cup of meal, which is the point of the book: to show the product performing where butter or lard would ordinarily be used.
- Creaming two tablespoons of fatThere is too little shortening here to cream properly with the sugar in the classic sense. Work them together with a spoon or paddle until the sugar is evenly distributed, then proceed.
- Sifting three timesRepeated sifting distributed the leavening through coarse-milled meal and broke up lumps. With modern baking powder and uniform cornmeal, one pass through a sieve, or a thorough whisking, is enough.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to one cup of dry ingredients is heavy by current standards, and too much powder can leave a bitter, off taste. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder is ample.
- YieldTwelve as written, though they will be small; this batter will not fill standard muffin cups much beyond half.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, and it is advertising in the shape of a cookbook: 615 recipes, in which Crisco stands in for butter, lard, or suet. Hydrogenated cottonseed oil was a genuinely new kind of kitchen fat, and the booklet worked hard to reassure cooks that a shortening made from a cotton by-product could do everything animal fat did, while keeping better in a warm pantry and costing less. Corn muffins were a shrewd choice to demonstrate: cornbread in some form was already familiar food in much of the United States, and strongest as a staple in the South, usually made with bacon drippings or lard, so a reader could test the claim against something she already knew how to bake.