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Imperial Muffins
½ cupful scalded milk 1/4 cupful sugar 1/4 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt. yeast cake 3/4 cupful lukewarm water 1¾ cupfuls flour 1 cupful cornmeal Add sugar and salt to milk; when lukewarm add yeast cake dissolved in 1 1/4 cupful of the water, and 1/4 cupfuls flour, cover, and let rise until light, then add Crisco, cornmeal, remaining flour and water. Let rise over night, in morning fill Criscoed muffin rings, two-thirds full; let rise until rings are full and bake thirty minutes in hot oven. Sufficient for twelve muffins.
This is a yeast-raised cornmeal muffin baked in rings, not a quick-bread muffin, and the ingredient list as printed has been mangled — read the points below before shopping.
- Amounts the method does not supplyThe printed page was checked and the quantities now match our text. The method still calls for milk, sugar and salt without stating amounts for them, so work from a batter consistency you know: about a cupful of milk with a tablespoonful of sugar and a half teaspoonful of salt suits twelve muffins made from 1 3/4 cupfuls flour and a cupful of cornmeal.
- What the amounts probably wereComparable raised cornmeal muffins of the period use roughly a cupful of milk, a tablespoonful or two of sugar, a teaspoonful of salt and two to four tablespoonfuls of fat. Those are inferences from similar recipes, not from this page, so treat the printed figures as unreliable rather than as instructions.
- A yeast cakeThe usual modern substitution for one compressed yeast cake is one packet of active dry yeast, about 2 1/4 teaspoons, though cake sizes of the period varied. Dissolve it in the quarter cupful of lukewarm water as directed.
- Hot oven"Hot" in period usage is generally somewhere around 400 to 450F; the book gives no figure. Thirty minutes at that heat suits a deep ring filled with a slack yeast batter; check at twenty.
- Muffin ringsThese are open metal rings, the kind still sold for English muffins, set on a baking sheet rather than a muffin tin's cups. Greased tins work, though the muffins will be taller and rounder than intended.
- CriscoedSimply means greased with Crisco. Any solid vegetable shortening or butter does the same job here.
- The overnight riseThe long cool ferment softens the cornmeal and develops flavour. In a warm kitchen the batter may over-ferment and taste sour by morning, so refrigeration is worth considering.
- YieldTwelve muffins, as stated.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco — hydrogenated cottonseed oil — in 1911 as a substitute for both lard and butter. The book's purpose was to prove the new fat could stand in anywhere in the household repertoire, which is why an ordinary raised cornmeal muffin appears here with the shortening written into the method and even into the verb "Criscoed." Yeast-leavened cornmeal muffins baked in rings were long-standing American breakfast fare, descended from the same tradition as the raised muffins and gems of nineteenth-century cookbooks.