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Sour Milk Tea Cakes
1 cupful cornmeal 2 cupfuls flour 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3/4 cupful sugar 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1½ cupfuls sour milk 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful lemon extract Beat up the eggs, add meal and milk and mix well, add flour, sugar, soda, and salt sifted together. Now add extract and Crisco, melted, and beat two minutes. Divide into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake in moderate oven fifteen minutes.
Sufficient for sixteen cakes.
A plain cornmeal muffin leavened by the reaction between soda and sour milk. Two things determine whether they rise: genuinely acidic milk, and getting the batter into the pans without delay.
- Sour milkThis meant milk that had naturally soured and thickened, which pasteurized milk will not do safely. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or stir 1½ tablespoons of lemon juice or white vinegar into 1½ cupfuls of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, measured as 4 tablespoons (2 oz) and then melted. Melted butter gives more flavour but a slightly heavier crumb, since the recipe was designed around a neutral fat.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans were the period equivalent of a muffin tin, with oval or round cups generally smaller than a modern muffin cup. A 12-cup standard muffin tin, filled two-thirds, is the closest match; the stated yield of sixteen suggests smaller cups.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. At that temperature fifteen minutes suits gem-sized cakes; standard muffin cups need closer to 18-20 minutes.
- Work quicklyThe soda begins reacting with the sour milk the moment they meet. Mix, pan, and bake without pausing, and preheat the oven and grease the pans before you start.
- CornmealFine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not self-rising cornmeal mix, which already contains leavening and salt.
- Salt and sugarA full teaspoon of salt with 3/4 cupful sugar reads high by modern muffin standards, though the recipe gives no explanation; the result is semi-sweet rather than cupcake-sweet.
- Lemon extractA teaspoonful of extract is assertive. The finely grated zest of one lemon gives a rounder flavour if you prefer it.
- ServingBest warm, split and buttered, the day they are made. Cornmeal batters stale quickly.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to teach American cooks what to do with a then-new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a solid white fat that behaved like lard but kept without refrigeration and carried no animal flavour. Sour-milk cornmeal gems were long-established in American home baking, using up the naturally soured milk that a household with a milk cow produced — so a reader met the fat in an otherwise familiar recipe. The book's habit of using "Crisco" as a verb ("Criscoed and floured gem pans") is advertising doing double duty as instruction. The underlying chemistry is older than the brand: acidic milk plus baking soda produces carbon dioxide directly, which is why soda breads and sour-milk cakes predate commercial baking powder.