top of the mmmuffin to you

observations around appetites, ingredient trends, and 90s home baking

It always began with a clatter at 4 in the morning: the dishwasher was released from its nightly duties, plates and cups crescendo on return to cupboard. Then, the oven would awake, beeping and blinking as it warmed the kitchen up. Nutmeg and cinnamon and chocolate chips would be folded into a bowl, ready for my mother’s electric mixer.

This was the routine in my childhood household on many mornings, my mum waking early to clean and bake muffins, me and my brother groaning at her for it. Sure, our air smelt good, but why must it be so early? She was one of many mothers in the 90s that went on to inspire modern meme content, the maternal urge to let everyone know they were sleeping and doing nothing while mothers are doing something and everything.  

My resentment turned into mockery in my teen years, albeit muffin specific. I don’t know when or why it became such a fixation. It was easy target practice while making sense of a much deeper and darker world as a teen. Yet still, my mother baked and packed the muffins. Or she would let us slip one into our mittened hands as we ran out to catch a bus. We may have given her grief about it, but we always ended up eating them. She never stopped, and we never questioned motivation so much as timing. 

A recent encounter with a giant zucchini initiated a journey back toward the humble muffin, and how it reveals key elements of my own appetite and sense of personal history.

In university, I worked as a lifeguard between classes. One summer, I worked out at Curve Lake health centre and made some arrangements with families to provide their kids swimming lessons in exchange for vegetable bumper crops. It was always zucchini, and I was in the peak of my disordered eating struggles. I’d use the Oh She Glows chocolate and oil-free zucchini muffin recipe to get through the absurd number of zucchinis. It was a recipe that checked a lot of my restrictive boxes, though consistently made for dense, tiny muffins.

When, this past summer, my uncle-in-law jokingly offered up one of his garden’s mega-zucchinis, I took it, knowing the steadfast recipe I could use. But on a whim, I changed my mind. Why not use a different recipe, nearly a decade later? I made two dozen zucchini muffins to take on a camping trip, using up the second half of the zucchini with great satisfaction.

The recipe I followed called for nutmeg, a spice that I use rarely, but one that distinctly reminds me of growing up in the 90s. It felt a fitting return to muffin form to use the flavours of my youth rather than my struggles. It made me think about how fickle our popular appetites are – fads and trends around what foods are cool quickly change, leaving the remnants of sundried tomatoes and pink peppercorn and Cobb salads to spoil in pantries or fade away entirely.

The muffin was everywhere in 1990s Canada. Toronto-based Mmmuffins was a chain that spoke to the emerging needs of giant, on-the-go foods that played the part of snack and meal all-in-one. These were muffins the size of my child-face: a ratio of 2:1 for top to bottom, the kind Elaine Benes would love. On muffin tops, she famously proclaimed: “It’s the best part. It’s crunchy, it’s explosive, it’s where the muffin breaks free of the pan and sort of does its own thing.”

In an interview with the Toronto Star, the co-founder of Mmmuffins said that the giant muffins they made were a gamble that paid off:

“Muffins were usually one-and-a-half ounces, they didn’t have much of a top and they were more of a commodity. You had staples like blueberry, corn and bran. These muffins were four, four-and-a-half ounces, triple the size and were full of different grains, fruits, seeds, they were really interesting”

These felt right in the pop culture context, where you had a group of friends hanging out in a fictional coffee shop on your TV each week (pick your fighter, Lorelai and Rory or the Friends), Jerry Seinfeld was questioning why everyone needed their coffee in a to-go cup, and the Sex and the City antics played out around the “good muffins” — while never defined, Carrie quips that she barely had time to shove a ‘good muffin’ in her purse before she was back to New York.

Muffins feel like a cultural zeitgeist of a time where appetites were increasingly not fed at the home table. Snacking and on-the-go eating were bolstered by chains like Mmmuffins opening across malls, or third spaces like coffee shops becoming more youth-friendly. Smoking sections were torn down in Tim Hortons (a relief for kids like me who grew up around their dad’s ash trays), and a food culture that embraced comforts, like warm spices and earthy espresso. I was not a kid that visited many cafes, but by the time I hit my teen years, our small town had at very least opened the opportunity for kids to use their part-time earnings on burnt coffee and bad café dates.

In speaking about the crash of Mmmuffins across Canada (from 130 stores to 2 by 2019), Bergman acknowledges it was purely due to creativity drying up in a changing landscape marked by healthism:

“Food is a very creative sector and very rarely can you not have to reinvent yourself. I observed that Marvellous Muffins stopped innovating,” says Bregman on how Mmmuffins failed to adapt after he sold it. “I don’t know what they could have done, but they couldn’t stay still as other brands evolved. It sounds crazy now, but in the beginning we hit the health trend. But things change, and they had to keep up with what’s the next trend while keeping the core of what they offered.”

When I was in lifeguard training around 2007, I had one of my mum’s muffins packed as a snack during my 10-hour a day training session. The instructor remarked that I was basically eating

a portable cake, and I laughed. But by then, the flavours and attitudes around what made for a “heathy” snack had indeed shifted rapidly. It was all fat-free Activia yogurts, a handful of almonds, whole grain breads, and GORP (heavy on the “p” at the end).

I’m fully within my own muffin-making era now, laughing to myself about it while reconciling how cruel I was to my own mother about her practices. My daughter, 8, is all limbs; a groggy blur in the morning who’s already getting sick of her old breakfast staples.

I spend a lot of time observing her appetite, perhaps fearful it will shape into one like mine did around her age (a lack of). Breakfast was the first meal I ditched, which got me in trouble as I attempted the 5 am portion of two-a-day practices for rowing. “You can’t just show up on an empty stomach!” my young male coach would scream at me from his motorboat.

“You can’t tell me to make more space in the boat and not think it will come to that!” I’d yell back, in my head.

Mindful of this, I ask my daughter what she would eat in the mornings. What is grabbable, attainable? What makes a weakened appetite alight in the early pink and purple hours of Ontario autumn?

“Muffins?” she says, with a hopeful head tilt. “I really liked the ones you made for camping.”

We review the flavours she still finds exciting, ones that might challenge her a bit more, ones that might also help me use up fruit and veg that is always at risk of spoiling in my kitchen (carrots, bananas, zucchini). When she was younger, I’d throw spinach and applesauce and bananas together in flour for “Shrek Muffins,” the only way I could convince her to eat green foods during a lingering hunger strike in Grade One. Now, appetite is more a “please just eat something” than a “eat more vegetable.”

I’m also in a phase where I need more grabbable foods, one that I can eat with one hand while feeding a baby and making lunch and putting away the dishes (at 7 am, though – I’m not my mother). It’s a new season for all of us, one where we’re balancing out convenience and costs, where I’m trying to be mindful of what we have in the kitchen and use it in ways that make more sense for a family that can’t sit down together for breakfast.

The phase won’t last, but muffins seem like a good compromise, for now.

muffin recipes:

Here's a recipe list of what we’ve made so far, for those who want to have a muffin-making fall like me:

1. Zucchini Muffins from Sally’s Baking Addiction

2. Lemon Poppyseed from Handle the Heat (I didn’t make the glaze, though).

3. Carrot Cake Muffins from Broma Bakery

4. Rey and Sarah’s Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins (recipe links to a Google doc, because we just played around until we found some ratios that worked for us a couple summers ago).

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This newsletter covers issues around food, health, identity, and environment, with topics like making sense of girl dinner, if groceries should be considered a splurge, and how Mormon mommies have dominated the health space on Instagram. It is updated biweekly, and includes two additional posts for paid subscribers (a monthly interview transcript from popular podcast episodes, and a recommendation round-up of shows, books, and podcasts).

AnthroDish News:

I was interviewed by Harness Magazine on the time in my twenties where I was single parenting my daughter and pursuing my PhD, which you can read here.

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