Rye Muffins
2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 cupful ryemeal 2 tablespoonfuls brown sugar ½ teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 egg 2 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful milk Sift flour, meal, baking powder, and salt together. Beat egg and sugar together, then add them with milk and melted Crisco. Mix and divide into Criscoed gem pans and bake in moderate oven twelve minutes. Sufficient for twelve muffins. 1 yeast cake 4 tablespoonfuls sugar ½ cupful Crisco
A plain quick-bread muffin from Procter & Gamble's 1913 promotional cookbook, written to demonstrate that hydrogenated shortening could stand in for butter and lard. Two things in the text need sorting out before you start.
- The missing flourThe method says to sift "flour, meal, baking powder, and salt" but the ingredient list gives no flour at all. Comparable muffin formulas of the period pair one cup of rye meal with one cup of white flour, and a batter of rye meal alone with a single cup of milk will be stiff and heavy. Treat this as an omission in the original and add about a cup of all-purpose flour.
- The stray lines at the end"1 yeast cake, 4 tablespoonfuls sugar, 1/2 cupful Crisco" belongs to the next recipe in the book and has bled into this one. Ignore it entirely; nothing here is yeast-raised.
- RyemealRye meal is coarsely ground whole rye, closer to a medium rye flour or a stone-ground rye than to the light white rye sold for sandwich loaves. Whole or dark rye flour is the nearest supermarket substitute; it absorbs liquid slowly, so let the batter stand two or three minutes before panning.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, melted and cooled slightly so it does not scramble the egg. Melted butter gives a better flavor at the same volume.
- Gem pansGem pans were muffin pans, usually cast iron though tin ones were also sold, with shallow oval or round cups. Sizes varied and many were somewhat smaller than a modern standard muffin cup, so treat a standard tin as an approximate equivalent. "Criscoed" simply means greased. The recipe's own "Sufficient for twelve muffins" makes twelve cups right for this quantity.
- Oven and timeA moderate oven is 350-375F. Twelve minutes is brisk for a muffin at that heat; expect 15 to 20 minutes, and test with a skewer rather than the clock. Rye browns darkly, so color alone is a poor guide.
- SweetnessTwo tablespoons of brown sugar makes a barely sweet muffin meant for butter and a savory meal. Increase to a quarter cup if you want something closer to a modern breakfast muffin.
The Story of Crisco appeared in 1913, two years after Procter & Gamble launched Crisco in 1911 as the first widely sold hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, and its recipes are credited to Marion Harris Neil, described on the book's own title page as formerly cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The book's job was to prove that the new fat could do everything butter and lard did, which is why a modest rye muffin gets the same careful treatment as a company cake: every recipe is a demonstration, and "Criscoed" appears as a verb throughout. Rye itself was long-established in American home baking, particularly in New England and the mid-Atlantic, where it grew on thin soils that would not carry wheat and turned up in rye-and-Indian bread, brown bread, and quick breads like this one. By 1913 rye was no longer a necessity but a flavor, and a muffin of rye meal cut with white flour and raised with baking powder is a fair snapshot of that transition.