Bettina’s Christmas Breakfast Muffins (1917)

Reviewed by
Jump to Recipe
Vintage-style illustration of Muffins (AI-generated)
Illustrations are AI-generated in a vintage style. The recipe is shown exactly as it was published in 1917; we have not photographed a test batch.

Twelve muffins, seven ingredients, two minutes of beating and twenty minutes in the oven. That is the whole recipe, printed in New York in 1917 by authors who never stopped to explain where the rise would come from. They didn’t need to, and the reason they didn’t is a story about chemistry, bribery and the end of waiting all night for bread.

Please note that some of the images in this article were created with the assistance of AI.

From A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband with Bettina’s Best Recipes, 1917

The Story Behind This Recipe

A big promise and a short recipe

The book’s title promises a lot: A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband with Bettina’s Best Recipes. Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles LeCron wrote it, and the Britton Publishing Company of New York brought it out in 1917. The text we have comes from an A. L. Burt printing of the same book.

The recipe sits in a chapter called "A Christmas Breakfast." Bettina sets a tiny Christmas tree in the middle of a nine o’clock family breakfast table, with the gifts grouped around its base, and serves grapefruit with maraschino cherries, oatmeal and dates with whipped cream, ham cooked with milk, creamed potatoes, waffles with maple syrup, and these muffins with orange marmalade.

Among those thousand ways, this one is about as brisk as it gets. The measures are clipped to shorthand, "2 C-flour" and "4 t-baking powder," as if the cook were reading over the authors’ shoulders. There is no yeast, no sour milk and no overnight rest. You stir the dry things together, beat in an egg and a cup of milk, add a little melted butter and fill the pans halfway. That plainness is the interesting part, because it rests on an ingredient that had only recently become ordinary.

Two muffins, one name

The older English muffin is something quite different: a yeast-raised round cooked on a griddle. One food-history reference suggests that kind may go back to Wales in the 10th or 11th century. The American muffin took another route. It is a quick bread, made from a batter and baked in individual molds.

That route began at the end of the 18th century, when American cooks started raising batters with pearlash, a refined potash that releases carbon dioxide in dough. Amelia Simmons printed pearlash recipes in American Cookery in 1796. Commercial baking powder took until the 1850s to arrive. Our 1917 muffin comes straight from that American line: a batter, a pan and a rise that comes from a can.

The can that changed breakfast

Consider the alternative. A Smithsonian food historian describes yeast doughs that needed upwards of 12 hours to rise, and often nearer 24. Pearlash was hard to make, caustic and frequently smelly. Baking soda appeared in 1846, but it needed an acid, usually sour milk, and since nobody could say exactly how sour a given jug was, every batch was a small gamble. In 1856 the chemist Eben Norton Horsford patented the first modern baking powder. He later packed the acid and the soda into one container, with cornstarch to keep them dry, and sold it as Rumford.

Then the fight started. Royal made its powder with cream of tartar, and Calumet and Clabber Girl used alum, which was cheaper and stronger. Royal advertised its purity, and in 1899 it bribed the Missouri legislature into banning alum powders. When press coverage of the scandal spread, the state’s lieutenant governor had to resign. Price wars went on well into the next century. Meanwhile, family recipes still assumed acid and soda, so the powder companies printed their own cookbooks to teach the new method. By 1917, a recipe could simply say "4 t-baking powder" and move on. That one line tells us the new method had won.

1910s

Notes From the Era

One can instead of two ingredientsHorsford’s idea of packing the acid and the soda together, with cornstarch to soak up moisture, meant cooks no longer had to buy and measure two separate chemicals. Around the turn of the 20th century, alum brands such as Calumet and Clabber Girl used alum instead of cream of tartar because it was cheaper and stronger.
Sweet milk, not sourOlder soda recipes often relied on sour milk for the acid, and that made them unpredictable. This muffin calls simply for ‘1 C-milk’. Baking powder carries its own acid, so the milk doesn’t need to be sour.
The muffin pan does the shapingQuick-bread muffins are made from a batter, not a dough, so they need molds to hold their shape. The recipe asks for ‘well-buttered muffin pans’ filled one-half full. Leaving room in each cup lets the baking powder lift the batter while it bakes.
A ‘moderate oven’ and no numberThe recipe doesn’t give a temperature. It only says ‘Bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven,’ so the cook had to judge the heat herself.
Reading the shorthandThe book writes measures as ‘C’ and ‘t’ joined to the ingredient with a hyphen, as in ‘2 C-flour’ and ‘4 t-baking powder’. The same lowercase ‘t’ appears with the baking powder, the salt and the melted butter, so as printed the butter comes to two teaspoons.
❦

The recipe · 1917

Muffins

From A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband with Bettina’s Best Recipes by Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles LeCron (1917). Every word of the recipe below is as printed.

MakesTwelve muffins
PansWell-buttered muffin pans, one-half full
BakeTwenty minutes in a moderate oven

Ingredients

  • 2 C-flour
  • 4 t-baking powder
  • 1/3 C-sugar
  • 1/2 t-salt
  • 1 egg
  • 1 C-milk
  • 2 t-melted butter

Method

  1. Mix the dry ingredients

    Mix the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt.

  2. Add egg and milk and beat

    Add the egg, beaten, and milk, and beat two minutes.

  3. Add the butter

    Add the melted butter.

  4. Fill the pans

    Fill well-buttered muffin pans one-half full.

  5. Bake

    Bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven.

Our notes

Reading It Today

C and t. The capital C is a cup and the lowercase t is a teaspoon. The same t sits beside the baking powder, the salt and the butter, so as printed the butter comes to two teaspoons, not two tablespoons.

A moderate oven. The recipe gives no temperature, only "a moderate oven," so the cook had to judge the heat herself.

Lean and lightly sweet. Two cups of flour get only a third of a cup of sugar, one egg and two teaspoons of butter. From those amounts we would expect a plain, bread-like muffin with a mild flavor, closer to something you split and butter than to a cake.

Half-full cups. Filling the cups only half full leaves room for the baking powder to lift the batter. That suggests modest, neat muffins rather than tall, domed ones.

Source: Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles LeCron, A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband with Bettina’s Best Recipes (Britton Publishing Company, New York, 1917). Read the 1917 book at Project Gutenberg.

Sources for the history

The original recipe text is from a work published in 1917 and is in the public domain in the United States. The history, notes and illustrations are Digstalk’s own. Brand names that appear in historic recipes are mentioned as historical fact only. Illustrations are AI-generated in a vintage style. The recipe is shown exactly as it was published in 1917; we have not photographed a test batch.