The delight of muffins for breakfast starts with the smell of muffins baking and ends with coffee or tea, some butter maybe and the pure heaven of a warm quick bread. Jumbo supermarket muffins are very nice, even if an official serving is half a muffin (as if). But a simple homemade muffin, like the ones made from these muffin recipes from The New Hood Cook Book (1941), can be even more satisfying and are a snap to bake.
The H.P. Hood Company has been a dairy company in New England since Harvey Perley Hood set up shop in Derry, NH in 1846, soon expanding into the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown, home of Bunker Hill. Like many food companies, they capitalized on the emerging science of home economics to provide useful information for homemakers that also promoted their products. The first book published by H.P. Hood was Daily Living: A Manual Designed to Simplify the Work of the Housekeeper (1908) by Nellie Elizabeth Ewart, which is still available from Amazon as a Kindle download. Their second book was The New Hood Cook Book: A Modern Cook Book of Practical Recipes, published just before the US entered World War II. The recipes were full of butter and cream and other dairy products, things that would be rationed the next year.
The muffin recipes from The New Hood Cook Book are simple and minimalist, they would look plain sitting next to a modern grocery store muffin. But don’t underestimate the power of fresh ingredients that are freshly baked. As further proof that this cookbook is full of good stuff, my copy has had the cover loved right off it and it’s got a champion level of spatters and stains. This book was very important in someone’s kitchen.
Let’s start with some guidelines for quick breads. The most important point is to not over mix the batter. Trust us on this. We know what happens when you do.
Now, how about some recipes. First a technical detail: all the recipes specify a “hot oven.” For modern ovens, that would be 400°-425°.
Sign me up for the Breakfast Muffins on a daily basis. I’ve never whipped egg whites and folded them into muffins, but I’d be willing to try it as directed in the English Breakfast Muffins. And the very idea of Pineapple Muffins makes us drool (in a very ladylike and graceful way).
This Bran Muffin recipe is intriguing because it doesn’t include molasses. These would be a lighter tasting bran muffin than what we’re used to. Corn Muffins are the stuff of which fabulous mornings and midnight snacks are made. The first recipe has a minimal amount of flour, the second has an equal amount of cornmeal and flour. It would be interesting to have a taste off.
I tested the Corn Muffins recipe because the ingredient proportions intrigued me. My guess was they weren’t going to be sweet and they were going to be dense. The batter took 5 minutes to mix up including time to check a couple texts on my phone. The instructions are accurate, it’s a pouring batter, not a dropping batter. They were baked in a 400° oven and were ready in 20, not 25 minutes.
The recipe is accurate, they are small muffins. And as I thought, they are very dense. In fairness, one teaspoon of baking powder is not going to be able to give much rise no matter how hard it tries. And one tablespoon of brown sugar isn’t going to make twelve muffins sweet. And one teaspoon of melted butter is not going to add a ton of moisture. They are not traditional corn muffins, but they are enjoyable spread with butter, and exceptionally enjoyable with a little jam on top of the butter.
For reference, I used the Verywell Fit Recipe Nutrition Calculator to analyze the Corn Muffin recipe. Each muffin has 231 calories.
So those are the muffin recipes from from The New Hood Cook Book. Which is most appealing to you? Let us know if you try out any of these recipes–we’d love to see a picture.
And now, dear reader, as a bonus, here is some kitchen knowledge also included in the book.
If you’re intrigued about this The New Hood Cook Book, there are lots of copies for sale online, all of which are in much better shape than my source copy. It covers all areas of cooking, not just baking, and is a time capsule of how Americans ate in the pre-war 1940s.
