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Muffins (Take two eggs and two)
Take two eggs, and two tablespoonfuls of white sugar and beat together. Add one and one-half cupfuls of sweet milk, one teacupful of white cornmeal, two cupfuls of flour, with two teaspoonfuls of baking powder sifted together, one teaspoonful of salt, and one tablespoonful of melted butter. Bake in well-greased gem pans fifteen minutes.
A plain cornmeal muffin of the kind that turned up at breakfast every week in the 1890s. The book assumes you know your own stove, so the one thing it omits is the oven temperature.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because ranges were judged by hand and eye. Fifteen minutes implies a fairly brisk oven; around 400-425F is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans were the standard muffin tin of the period, with rounded rather than straight-sided cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; grease it well, as the batter is lean in fat.
- A teacupfulNot a modern measuring cup. A teacup in American cookbooks of this era is usually reckoned at around 6 fl oz, so roughly 3/4 cup of cornmeal, though usage varied. The 'cupfuls' of flour are best read as ordinary cups, near enough to a modern 8 fl oz cup.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that appeared in soda-raised recipes. Whole milk is the closest match.
- White cornmealSouthern households in particular preferred white meal; yellow works and gives a deeper colour and a slightly stronger corn flavour. Use a fine or medium grind, not coarse polenta.
- MixingCombine only until the dry streaks disappear. The recipe reads like a batter to be beaten, but modern muffin practice is right here: overworking develops gluten and gives tunnels and a tough crumb.
- FatOne tablespoon of butter for two cups of flour is very lean by current standards. These are meant to be eaten hot with butter at the table rather than kept.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins. Best within an hour of baking; they stale quickly.
Cornmeal muffins sit at the junction of two traditions: the older American corn breads baked in iron and the lighter muffin risen with a chemical leavener. What dates this version is the baking powder, sifted with the flour rather than relying on soda and an acid as earlier recipes had. Commercial baking powders became widely available in American kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, though soda-and-sour-milk recipes continued to appear alongside them. The mixture of cornmeal with a larger proportion of wheat flour also suggests a softer, cakier crumb than plain corn bread gives.