Edna Staebler’s Date Orange Muffins

An entire orange – peel and all – goes into a food processor with dates and other stuff and you get these tasty treats!
First, a wee story. So as to not be buried under magazines, I eventually tear out pages/recipes I want to keep and then toss the zine. Once sorted and filed I sometimes end up with various versions of a favourite recipe – and such is the case with these muffins. They are nutritious, tasty and have a “cool” factor since the batter, which is made quickly in a food processor, includes a whole, unpeeled orange. The dates on my “torn pages” collection vary (2003, 2006) and there are slight variations on the ingredients or method, but not a single one makes any reference to the same recipe in Edna Staebler’s 1979 “[amazon_textlink asin=’0771082584′ text=’More Food That Really Schmecks’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’tastecanada-20′ marketplace=’CA’ link_id=’1ba10dda-74a7-11e8-82ef-abc2a7830580′]”.

Staebler must have been an impressive woman. Born in 1906, in Kitchener (then called Berlin), she achieved a university education and teaching qualifications. She was an accomplished author and wrote for many well-known Canadian publications. The cookbooks, she says, were an unplanned, but satisfying “accident”. As with many (good) cookbooks, the introductory chapters are a delight to read where she describes friends from the local Mennonite community (founded by families that migrated north from Pennsylvania – and originally from Europe). She waxes rhapsodically about her beloved Waterloo County and its entrepreneurial roots. Edna died in 2006 at the age of 100, and so she lived long enough to see her community grow and prosper.

Staebler’s cookbooks easily survive my (occasionally necessary) cookbook purges. With red-face, I confess that these days I prefer cookbooks with lots of photos – food porn, as it is now referred to. There is not a single photo in Edna’s books, yet I treasure them. She clearly announces in both books that she is not a trained cook. She said she loved cooking with “blissful abandon”. Today we might say that she “curated” these collections of hearty, rustic and tasty (schmecking) recipes that use local produce – saying she did not include any recipes that required some exotic import – such as kiwi – or a processed ingredient.

Her second “Schmecking” book was unavoidable, since after the first, people kept sending her contributions for a next book. In the second volume she noted that “the uncollected recipes in Waterloo County are boundless” – and clearly the contributors were happy to share their recipes and see them in print.

Staebler says this recipe comes from Ruby – and who knows how long it was around before 1979?

Enjoy the making and eating of Edna and Ruby’s muffins. I have made only one change from the original. First printed in 1979, her recipe suggested using a blender. Wikipedia says that food processors were appearing in the late 70’s and perhaps they were not yet a common household appliance at the time she published. I much prefer using a food processor.