What's in Grandma's Recipe Tin?-Corn Gems

This week's recipe was a simple, yet very tasty, cornbread muffin. Wednesday, June 19th was Juneteenth, and I wanted to celebrate the holiday. Traditional foods for this holiday are picnic-style foods, as well as something red to drink. In addition to the muffins, I also whipped up a batch of my potato salad recipe. I was going to make a boxed variety of cornbread muffin but I was lucky enough to find the perfect recipe to try in my grandmother's recipe tin, so I made that instead. Everything turned out great!

This recipe is a clip-out recipe card from the Family Circle magazine, from June of 1966. It's a quick recipe, I whipped it up after work in the evening and I don't think it took much longer to make than a boxed variety would have taken to make.

Here's all the ingredients, minus the shortening that was melting on the stove. I always like these line-up shots!

First things first, all the dry ingredients are mixed in a bowl. I sifted the flour before measuring it, and then sifted it again with all the other dry ingredients before adding the cornmeal and whisking well.

Here it is after you mix in the egg and buttermilk.

And here is the final product after you stir in the melted shortening. The difference is subtle, but you can see that it is a bit smoother than without it.

Here we go into the muffin tin! The bottom and sides did want to stick to the paper liners a bit, so you might consider spraying the liners with cooking spray just to help combat that.

And out of the oven, exactly the 20 minutes it calls for seemed to do the trick.

Here was my final dinner plate. I made the potato salad the night before, and bought the chicken from the deli that night. The red drink next to it is a store-bought frozen juice concentrate I got to help with my plantar fasciitis. What?-You're probably asking me right now. Yep. It turns out that rolling a frozen can of juice concentrate helps stretch and ice the muscles in your foot. And then you get to drink the juice afterwards. (My feet were clean and I had a towel over the can, don't worry!)

I ate the muffins with butter, and a glug of sorghum syrup to dip them in. The sorghum syrup was really tasty with it! I highly recommend this. The only thing to keep in mind with this recipe is that it doesn't not hold out over time. I tried them the next night and they were too dry to be edible. If you make this recipe, I recommend sharing it with others and eating it all the same day you make them.

So, there you have it! A really basic, simple cornbread muffin recipe that is a great starting place if you're not familiar with making them from scratch. It has just enough sugar to be slightly sweet, but not overly sweet like a lot of boxed varieties can be. This is a fast recipe, so don't worry about waiting till after work to make it. And for the most part, it's all ingredients people tend to have on-hand. All I had to buy was the buttermilk, which I never keep on-hand.

I encourage everybody to study up on Juneteenth, and try out this recipe next year to join in with the celebration! Happy eating and celebrating!

-Foodie