Many, many years ago I acquired my grandmother’s All About Baking cookbook. She gave it to me and told me it was her very first cookbook. It was reprinted in June 1936 which made her just about to turn thirteen years old. I suspect it may have been a birthday gift, although I don’t really know for sure. What I do know is that I've made a lot of recipes out of this book over the years.
What I do know about my great grandmother is that she was all about
raising and preparing her girls for life as a wife and mother so she taught
them all how to cook, clean, sew and do needlework from a very early age. Lessons that my grandmother admitted she didn’t
necessarily appreciate most of the time.
She’d much rather go outside and play in the dirt with her cousins.
Muffins were one
of those quick bread items one could whip up and bake in no time to accompany
just about any meal – breakfast, dinner or supper. With a good basic muffin recipe you can make them
plain or add ingredients, either sweet or savory, to jazz them up to go with
whatever you happen to be making. Adding
in fresh, frozen or dried fruits and a little bit more sugar for a sweeter
muffin goes well with breakfast foods or perhaps some leftover corn and some
bacon bits for a savory option next to a hot bowl of soup. The possibilities are pretty much endless.
I hope you enjoy
this muffin recipe I’m sharing from 1936.
I’ve been making these for years.
They are definitely heartier than the commercial modern muffin mixes you
can buy in the store. I think they are
so much better and tastier. Add a smear
of butter, maybe some jam, they just never disappoint. So good.
You've got me wanting to make muffins now...I love looking through old cookbooks, imagining life back then. In 1936 my mother was 6 years old and they were very poor. I know they ate a lot of cornbread and she learned to cook from an early age. I see muffins in my immediate future!
ReplyDeleteEnjoy Gina!
DeleteMy mother baked but never muffins. I didn't have them until I was an adult. Not sure why perhaps she didn't grow up having them. She never made chocolate chip cookies either though for that I suspect she thought chocolate chips were a costly addition to cookies. We had sugar, ginger & sometimes oatmeal cookies. She didn't make brownies either. She claimed she didn't like how hers turned out. Knowing how she cooks I suspect she baked them too long.
ReplyDeleteIt's fun to look through old cookbooks. I recently purged through my cookbooks. I probably gave away 100 maybe more. I still have plenty including my collection of old ones. I have a small notebook of saved & handwritten recipes from the 70s that I bought at a church rummage sale. So fun to look at. I also have my mothers old recipe collection that I organized and updated in the 70s for her when I was in high school. I also have a binder of all of mom's recipes from her cooking club in the 70s. I remember her making some of the recipes and it's fun to read the recipes she contributed. There were 2 cookbooks mom had and I remembered using back in the 70s (when I was in high school I'd stay up late and bake). Over the years both disappeared. In the last few years I found them at used book sales.
I think cookbooks are one of those things I could easily hoard if I wasn't careful. Especially vintage ones.
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