Bran muffins would seem like a natural American health food, since American food faddists had been concerned about overrefined flour since Sylvester Graham in the 1820s. However, health food writers were satisfied with whole-wheat “Graham gems” (smaller muffins) for the rest of the nineteenth century, during which wheat bran by itself was mostly fed to animals. (Muffins until the very end of that century were thick pancakes like English muffins.) The first printed recipe for a bran muffin may well be that in Fannie Farmer’s Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent, published in 1904. Miss Farmer liked the recipe well enough to include it in her final work, the 1912 A New Book of Cookery, but it went into general use mainly through high school home economics texts written in the teens of the twentieth century. During the last fifty years, bran muffins have been popularized as a healthy breakfast food in doughnut and casual restaurants.
