Noni’s blueberry muffins were among the best I’ve tasted. They had tall, domed tops and fluffy interiors, and were chockfull of blueberries that she and her sister Mary picked at their brother’s nearby farm. Noni and Mary picked blueberries each year and froze them in batches for baking. They refused to take my brothers and I with them to their brother’s farm in the next town, never explaining why. Herein begins the almost-mystery.
Also a bit strange: like me, my brothers remember these muffins with fondness, but our parents have no recollection of Noni ever making blueberry muffins. I think she often made them when our parents left us to stay at her house while they went out of town.
When I came across this card in Noni’s recipe box, it was one of the first ones I wanted to try. This is the whole recipe. Its minimalism is characteristic of Noni’s recipes, but it’s a little unusual in being typed.
My first attempt at these muffins was on a Saturday morning with no food or caffeine, a 4-year-old’s help, and a 1-year-old eating and throwing Cheerios and toys.
Since the recipe doesn’t include any details on how to combine the ingredients, I started by creaming together the substantial amounts of shortening and sugar in the standing mixer. I took the word “shortening” in the recipe to mean Crisco.
Since I more often bake with butter or safflower oil, using this much Crisco felt like a throwback to another era. But for this first try, I wanted to make the recipe as-written. Meanwhile, I put the 4-year-old to work rinsing the blueberries. A goodly amount were eaten by her and her sister in the process.
The batter came together like a cake batter, though I mixed in the dry ingredients with only gentle stirring, wanting to make sure that the baking powder batter wasn’t overworked.
Then I folded in the berries that had survived the girls’ attentions, and we filled the pans. The batter was very thick for muffins, and there was a lot of it. Since the recipe specified that it makes “12 large muffins,” I heaped the batter into the muffin cups, when I normally would have greased a second pan and made a few extra.
The baking instructions in the recipe were a little odd for muffins, starting for 5 minutes at a high temperature, then reducing the temperature for another 30 minutes. Without thinking much of it (at this point, I’d had caffeine, but no food yet), I used the convection function on our oven. It felt like a long time to bake muffins, and I wondered if it would make for an unusually crispy top.
The results were somewhat different than I expected, but my family declared them the best blueberry muffins they’d ever had.
They rose nicely, but not as high as I’d expected. While I followed the recipe and greased the top of the pan, it wasn’t necessary–they only rose as much as any other well-prepared muffin. I found the top a bit too crispy and the interior a bit too dense and cake-like.
The muffins were quickly devoured. I felt a little disappointed that they weren’t quite the way I’d remembered Noni’s. Though it may sound twee, I’d hoped that her minimalist recipe might unlock a taste of my childhood.
Nonetheless, they were very tasty with butter. As we ate, my husband and I speculated about why they may have turned out differently than I remembered. Noni didn’t own a standing mixer, so she probably mixed the batter with a hand-mixer or a spoon. This might explain why mine were denser; the standing mixer may have over-mixed the dry ingredients, in spite of my attempts to use it sparingly. Other differences include the fact that her pans were uncoated aluminum and her blueberries were local. She also never had a convection oven, and we wondered if baking them on the regular setting would better replicate the conditions in her kitchen.
Some will remember that Jordan Marsh, the supposed source of this recipe, was a department store with a bakery in it. Noni used to take me there to buy special occasion outfits, and she usually got me a black-and-white cookie, though never a blueberry muffin in my memory.
Since making this recipe, I’ve found that Jordan Marsh’s blueberry muffins are well represented on the internet, even though the department store was bought out by Macy’s in the 1990s. The New York Times, Yankee Magazine, King Arthur Flour, and many home bakers have already posted their versions of this recipe.
Noni’s recipe differs from these online versions in a few ways. The others call for butter instead of shortening, and only say to bake them at the lower temperature. They also say to mash some of the blueberries, and to sprinkle the tops with granulated sugar.
The almost-mystery of these muffins: how did Noni’s recipe wind with these differences? My father explained that she often filled her cookbooks with recipes gathered from newspapers and other sources. When a cookbook started to overflow, my meticulous grandfather would take out all the clippings and copy the recipes for her. My dad thinks he sometimes made mistakes in transcription, though this seems amazing to me. The man was a clock-maker who was incredibly precise in so many things that he did.
After making these pseudo-Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins, I wonder whether this recipe was the one Noni used at all. I can’t help but notice that the recipe card looks suspiciously clean. Maybe as I look through Noni’s cookbooks, one of them will fall open to a frequently-opened page with a blueberry muffin recipe. To be continued.
mangia all the cussing time 