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Indian Corn Muffins
Beat one egg thoroughly; put in a coffee cup; add one tablespoonful of brown sugar, one tablespoonful thick cream or butter; fill with buttermilk or sour milk, two handfuls cornmeal, one small handful wheat flour, one-half teaspoonful soda rubbed into the flour. Bake in muffin rings on a griddle.
A cup-and-handful recipe of the kind written for cooks who never measured. The proportions are sound once you pin them down, but the mixing order matters: the egg, sugar, fat and sour milk are all built up inside one cup before any dry goods go in.
- The coffee cupA period coffee cup is smaller than the 12-oz mug on your shelf; cookbooks of the era treat it as somewhere between about 3/4 cup and a full cup. Beating the egg in the cup and then "filling" it with buttermilk means you end up with roughly that much egg plus liquid in total.
- HandfulsTwo handfuls of cornmeal is about 1 cup; one small handful of flour is about 1/3 cup. The batter should pour thickly, like a heavy pancake batter — thin it with a spoonful more buttermilk if it mounds rather than spreads.
- Soda and sour milkThe half teaspoon of soda is the only leavener and depends entirely on the acid in the buttermilk. Rubbing it into the flour first, as directed, prevents soda pockets; cook the batter promptly, because the lift begins as soon as the wet and dry meet.
- Sour milkNineteenth-century "sour milk" was raw milk clabbered at room temperature. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute; milk soured with a teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice works but gives less flavor.
- Cornmeal"Indian meal" and cornmeal are the same thing — stone-ground, and coarser than most modern degerminated meal. A medium or coarse grind gives the texture intended; fine cornmeal makes a denser, cakier muffin.
- Muffin rings on a griddleThese are bottomless metal rings set on a greased griddle over moderate heat, filled halfway, cooked until set and dry at the edges, then flipped in the ring — closer to an English muffin than a baked one. Allow roughly 6 to 8 minutes a side over medium heat.
- If you use a muffin tin insteadBake in a greased tin in a hot oven, 425F, for 15 to 18 minutes. The crumb will be drier and the crust browner than the griddle version.
- YieldAbout six muffins — one modest breakfast serving for two or three people. The recipe doubles cleanly.
Cornmeal batters raised with soda and sour milk were the everyday quick bread of American households before commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable, and books of this period print many variations on the same handful of ingredients. The griddle-and-ring method preserved here is often said to be older than the muffin tin: it belonged to kitchens where the stovetop was always hot and the oven was fired only when there was enough baking to justify it. "Indian corn" and "Indian meal" were the standard English terms for maize and its meal from the colonial era onward, distinguishing it from "corn" in the older British sense of wheat or grain generally — the adjective gradually faded from ordinary use, retained chiefly in recipe titles like this one.