Cherry cornmeal muffins

Glace cherry cornmeal muffins made specially for the gluten intolerant but so delightful, you’ll want to bookmark the recipe regardless.

If you want these to be gluten free, use specialist gluten free flour instead of plain. I know – gluten intolerance is a pain. It means reading all labels like the most fascinating crime capers or like you’re studying for A Level Labels. It’s denying yourself golden, fluffy and rich brioche and having an oatcake instead. It’s when your pasta craving has to be satisfied by straight-to-wok rice noodles. It’s telling yourself that you’re baking lemon polenta, almond Santiago cake and flourless brownies only because you fancy them, not because they are gluten free. It means eating rice dishes in a noodle bar. It means no beer.

And it’s not even like the effects of ingesting gluten while intolerant are spectacular or impressive, like a good full-on anaphylactic shock or swelling all over and suffocating. No – it’s burping, gurgling and farting. Not sexy.

Whatever you say about coconut flour, teff, tapioca or cassava, people do not use them for baking because they have a choice and whimsically pick the substances that are smelly, unpleasantly tangy, and impossible to coalesce into dough. They have no choice: wheat or rye does not grow where they live or is far too expensive to afford for daily bread. Thus gluten freedom by choice is not only unnecessary: it makes a mockery of those folks’ lives; of their poverty and the ‘eat what grows’ imperative. There is a reason why wheat, rye and barley have become staples over centuries: they are the best, tastiest and easiest to process.

That is not to say that other grains are worthless, and I certainly wouldn’t say it about corn. It’s a grain which can also be called a vegetable; it gives us flour and a side dish, breakfasts and snacks. Cornmeal or polenta is wonderful in shortcrust pastries, sweet and savoury, and it dredges, coats and crusts as well as wheat flour or crumbs. And corn muffins are unfairly overlooked in the UK – the texture is unparalleled and goes well with both fruit and chocolate. True, you don’t get the muffin top as impressive as the one carried by wheat flour muffins but hey, we can do without it over the paper case as much as over our belts.

I adapted Melissa Clarke’s NY Times recipe cutting down the butter and adding glace cherries – not certain it’s made them healthier… And for my purposes gluten free flour mix goes in instead of plain flour. But if you’re intolerances and allergies free, enjoy them with wheat flour.