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Corn Muffins
Take the yolks of two eggs, beat well, and stir in gradually two tablespoonfuls of sugar. Pour in one and one-half teacupfuls of sweet milk, add a teaspoonful of salt, a teacupful of cornmeal, yellow or white, two teacupfuls of sifted flour, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder, and one tablespoonful of melted butter. Bake in gem pans.
A plain sweet-milk corn muffin from the era when muffin tins were called gem pans. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own cup, so the two things to settle before mixing are the size of the teacup and the heat.
- TeacupfulIn American books of this period a teacupful is usually reckoned at about ¾ cup, or 6 fluid ounces, as distinct from the 8-ounce cupful, though usage was not consistent from book to book. On that reading the milk is roughly 1⅛ cups, the cornmeal ¾ cup and the flour 1½ cups.
- No oven temperature givenMuffins of this type want a hot oven, 400–425F, so the batter sets and springs quickly. Baked at 350F the crumb goes dense and pale. Figure 15–20 minutes in a standard 12-cup tin.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan, usually with shallow oval or round cups. Any modern 12-cup muffin tin works; if you use iron, heating the greased pan in the oven before filling it will give a crisper crust.
- SaltA full teaspoon is at the upper end of what modern recipes use for this quantity of meal and flour; if you are using fine table salt, ¾ teaspoon is a safe reduction.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder for roughly 2¼ cups of combined meal and flour is at the low end by current practice. If your muffins come out squat, go to a scant tablespoon next time.
- The two egg whitesOnly the yolks are used, which gives a tender, slightly custardy crumb. You are left with two whites to use elsewhere, or you can whip and fold them in for a lighter muffin.
- CornmealYellow or white is genuinely a matter of taste here, but modern degerminated meal is drier than the stone-ground meal assumed by the book. If the batter looks stiff rather than pourable, let it stand ten minutes so the meal hydrates before filling the pans.
- Handling and yieldStir only until the flour disappears; overworking gives tunnels and toughness. Expect about 12 standard muffins, best eaten warm the day they are baked.
Corn muffins sit at the join between two baking traditions: the cornmeal breads that fed American households from the colonial period onward, and chemical leavening, which spread through American baking over the course of the nineteenth century. Recipes like this one — meal cut with a larger proportion of wheat flour, sweetened, raised with baking powder rather than yeast or beaten eggs alone — are a late, refined version of the older hoecakes and johnnycakes. The name of the pan places it broadly: "gem pans" were common cast-iron muffin pans from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and the little cakes baked in them were often simply called gems.