Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix: Permeating the American Psyche and Disrupting the Culinary Dynamic in Kitchens Across the Nation

Food science is not necessarily the career that comes to mind when you think of shady back room dealings and large payoffs in the form of used greenbacks slipped under bathroom doors. Yet how else would corporate behemoths like Coca Cola, General Mills, (and on a much, much smaller scale, Chelsea Milling Company, producer of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix) manage to keep their secret recipes from being smuggled out of their labs and sold to the American public? What, in reality, is keeping a group of food scientists from analyzing the exact ingredients in any given product, down to the milligram, and broadcasting the reconstructed recipe via World Wide Web using a shell account set up through a sub-station in Antarctica?

There is a niche market for that kind of thing - websites with names such as www.topsecretrecipes.com and books like "Top Secret Restaurant Recipes: Creating Kitchen Clones from America's Favorite Restaurant Chains" exist so that, when the mood strikes, you can whip up your own little slice of Applebee's heaven without having to leave a tip for less-than-stellar service. But none of these painstakingly constructed references hold the recipe I've been searching for: how to make Jiffy Corn Muffins without using Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix.

Even the biggest restaurant chains have their dirty little secrets. Marie Callender's Restaurant and Bakery? According to one of these tell-all recipe websites, their "famous" cornbread is supposedly a box of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix added to a box of Jiffy Yellow Cake Mix. How is it possible that Jiffy, introducing their Corn Muffin Mix in 1950, has not only survived all these years without producing one line of advertising, but has done so at a significant rivalry to Bisquick? How have they been able to so subtly - and successfully - take over the hearts and minds of America, infiltrating our dry-goods aisles and kitchen pantries?

And why, I've been asked, won't I just make corn muffins from The Mix? Why do I insist on wasting all this time trying to find a recipe that tastes just like Jiffy when I can just add one egg and 1/3 cup milk to the contents of the little blue box and be done with it?

"Because," I answer, "someone has to." "If I don't do it, who will?"

I want to be able to take a steaming batch of homemade goodness out of the oven and know that it was me and not some automated robot that added just the right amounts of: "wheat flour; corn meal; sugar; lard; leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, monocalcium phosphate); and 2% or less of each of the following: salt, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, and folic acid" in order to make the perfect muffins that everyone will be talking about. Swooning as the sun-yellow crumbs melt on their tongues and over-stimulate their taste buds, my guests will beg me for the recipe, and I'll just give them a wink and a sly smile and tell them that it's a "family secret that has been handed down for generations".

Everyone has to have their goals in life. This is mine.

My seemingly simple quest has been, at times, an infuriating one, for how many different ways can there be to construct a corn muffin? More, my friend, than you would ever like to know.

I erroneously assumed that moving south of the Mason-Dixon Line would aid in my discovery of the perfect golden corn muffin recipe: slightly sweet and moist on the inside, with just a hint of a crust formed over the top. The problem is, here in the South, the "perfect little corn muffin" is a nonentity. Similar to the rivalry amongst us Italians, where I will always believe that my nonna (and not yours) makes le lasagne più buone, Southerners have their own sense of allegiance as to what a proper corn muffin should taste like.

I've found that the traditional corn muffin, similar to its popular counterpart, the biscuit, just isn't as sweet as I assumed it would be down in the land of sugared-teas and Mint Juleps. Martha White, a popular brand that puts out self rising (white!) corn and regular flours comes complete with recipes stamped on the back of the five-pound bags. Neither one calls for sugar; neither one tastes that great. The recipes are touted as "traditional" meaning all you need to add is 1) a fat: shortening, oil, or lard; to either 2) milk or buttermilk; and 3) mix in the flour. (If you are making the cornbread, you also add an egg.)

I have accumulated hundreds of recipes, and in the past month (to the chagrin of my neighbors and the joy of the local avian population) I've mixed, baked, and slaved over more than I can count. Augmenting in place of my satisfaction is both my waistline and my electricity bill (from the oven being at a constant 350 degrees). My coworkers have seen me eat more corn muffins than (as my mother would say) Carter's got pills.

In preparation for the next experimental batch, I munch on corn muffins all day. For snacks and lunch, and in the times between snacks and lunch: I can't start on a new recipe until the current one has been completely finished. I try to pawn off the ones that I think are somewhat edible and fit for consumption on my neighbors, but they don't have the discipline that I do. They can only handle so many muffins in any given week.

Out running my daily errands after work, I'll drop easily into conversation with unsuspecting passersby, and before too long I will have asked an otherwise perfect stranger if, by chance, they happen to have a good corn muffin recipe? I harbor a secret hope that maybe, one day, I'll run into a disgruntled descendant of 1930's housewife and Jiffy inventor Mabel Holmes who perhaps has been shutout of the still-thriving family business, and they'll hand me over the recipe just for spite. It's a small world. Stranger things have happened.

Instead, I'm usually greeted with an enthusiastic "Yes!" and as I hurriedly get out my pen and paper, desperately trying not to miss a word, my shoulders slump, defeated, as I hear them begin to say, "You take one box of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix, and add..."

And thus Jiffy continues to successfully cross socio-economic, racial, and political boundaries, defy brand loyalty, and demand an idolatry all its own...leaving me holding the box.