Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins

Buttery, sweet, and bursting with blueberries.

Of all the blueberry muffin recipes in all the land, the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins recipe bests them all. Here’s the official recipe for Jordan Marsh department store’s famous blueberry muffins, with a few (dare we say?) tiny improvements for perfect results, every time.

Jordan Marsh’s Blueberry Muffin Recipe

I usually eat a savory breakfast. But sometimes, we need something sweet on the table, and nothing is better than a warm breakfast baked good like blueberry muffins (with French toast coming in at a close second in the best sweet breakfast department).

The Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins are legendary. Though the original Jordan Marsh department store closed years ago, you can still bring some of their famous dining room treats to your home. With this original blueberry muffin recipe, you’re in for a batch of buttery, soft, moist blueberry muffins bursting with jammy berries. Serve them warm from the oven with good butter.

Jordan Marsh’s blueberry muffin recipe is so good because it is:

• Easy to make
• Makes a perfect dozen muffins
• Has just the right amount of juicy blueberry muffins, and
• Yields a tender, buttery muffin that stays moist for days

And I love anything baked with blueberries. If you do, too, you’ll want my recipe for perfect blueberry pound cake and this easy blueberry cobbler recipe.

The History of the Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins Recipe

I am pretty sure that I’m not the first, thousandth, or last person to assume that Jordan Marsh of the famous blueberry muffin might be the name of one person, perhaps a kindly home baker who rose to fame as part of a regional baking contest or county fair. But no! The Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins’ history is quite different.

What are the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins? The Jordan Marsh department store‘s blueberry muffin recipe’s history originates way back to the 1800s.

Jordan Marsh is a now-shuttered New England department store, based in Boston, founded by Eban Jordan and Benjamin Marsh in 1841. Like many grand department stores of yore, Jordan Marsh’s had a dining room, where visitors could enjoy, among other things, buttery blueberry muffins. When the store was acquired by Macy’s in the mid-1990s, however, the dining room (and muffins) were phased out.

But the recipe lived on. According to the New York Times, in 1985, the Times food journalist Marian Burros got wind through a reader that the best blueberry muffin recipe not the Ritz-Carlton recipe she had written about, but rather, was the muffin served at the Jordan Marsh department store. Ms. Burros got a hold of the muffin recipe and the rest was blueberry muffin history.

But wait, there’s one more coda to the story, because the source of Jordan Marsh’s original recipe remained unknown until very recently. According to the Times’s blueberry muffin recipe headnote:

[In 2023,] Mara Richmond of Burlington, Vt., wrote The Times to say that the developer of the recipe was her father, Arnold Gitlin, then the executive food consultant for Allied Stores, which owned Jordan Marsh at the time. His recipe, Richmond said, was an adaptation from one in Esther Howland’s 1847 cookbook, “The New England Economical Housekeeper, and Family Receipt Book.”

How to Make These Blueberry Muffins

This recipe stays true to the original, with a couple of tiny, helpful tweaks. The Jordan Marsh recipe calls for fork-mashing some of the blueberries, and does not use lemon zest. This recipe skips the blueberry mashing to save time, because the blueberries will cook and get jammy all on their own. Adding lemon zest heightens the flavor of the batter just a bit, without tasting lemony. But feel free to leave it out.

The Jordan Marsh muffin recipe uses standard blueberry muffin ingredients, and is mixed together easily and then baked. Here’s how to bake a batch.

Ingredients

• Unsalted butter for tender texture and buttery flavor and richness
• Sugar for sweetness and to help whip air into the batter
• Eggs to add structure and richness
• Zest of one lemon, optional (this is the only ingredient that is not original, but it tastes good)
• Pure vanilla extract adds a sweet aroma
• All-purpose flour the building block of the muffin batter. I use unbleached, King Arthur flour.
• Baking powder for leavening. This helps the muffins rise.
• Kosher salt (I use Diamond Crystal) to help balance the sweetness.
• Milk for moisture and a little extra flavor
• Blueberries, washed and picked over for stems. These are the star of the show, and will get jammy and so good when baked.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 375°F and line with cupcake liners a standard 12-muffin tin.
2. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
3. Add the eggs, lemon zest (if using), and vanilla extract. Mix the batter on medium-high again until very light and fluffy, scraping the bowl to make sure everything is evenly incorporated.
4. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt, alternating with the milk. Mix just until incorporated. Do not overmix.
5. Scoop the batter into the muffin tin. Bake, then let cool for at least 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Serve warm with soft butter.

You will also like: Really Good Banana Bread and Blueberry Hand Pies

Some Notes on Baking the Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins

Here are a few quick tips and notes for baking these muffins.

1. Which blueberries to use in blueberry muffins?

It is fine to use fresh or fresh-frozen blueberries (IQF) for the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffin recipe. Do not defrost the blueberries before adding them to the batter. Just add them frozen. Note: frozen berries may take the muffins an extra minute or two to bake.

I love wild Maine blueberries, but they do not make the best muffins. These little jewels taste great, but tend to get lost in the blueberry muffin batter. Use standard blueberries for muffins to get nice, big bursts of jammy blueberry.

2. How do I keep blueberries from sinking to the bottom of blueberry muffins?

Here’s a very helpful tip that you should know when baking with blueberries, both in cakes or muffins:

Toss the blueberries with a small amount of the flour mixture before folding them into the blueberry muffin batter. Use part of the flour measurement in the recipe, not additional flour. The flour forms a grippy coating on the blueberries, which prevents sinking. That said, this is a fairly thick batter, so I have never had a problem with blueberries sinking in these blueberry muffins when you stir the berries in plain to the large mixing bowl with the rest of the batter.

I also like to dot the top of the muffins with a few blueberries before baking. This ensures that there will be visible, juicy blueberries on the top of each muffin.

3. What is the secret to moist muffins?

The secret to moist muffins boils down to three things:

1. Not overmixing the batter, 
2. The right ratio of fats and liquefiers to dry ingredients, and 
3. Baking the muffins in the oven for the right amount of time.

Overmixing the batter could result in too much gluten development, which could leave the blueberry muffins a bit tough. Once the dry ingredients and berries are fully folded in, stop.

“Liquefier” is a fancy professional pastry chef term for wet ingredients (the eggs, teaspoon vanilla extract, milk), plus sugar, which dissolves into a liquid when heated and baked. Here, the nice amount of sugar and butter makes these moist blueberry muffins.

Muffins can become overbaked quickly, thanks to their small size. The baking time should be fairly accurate on this, a total time of about 25-30 minutes. But ovens do differ, so test the muffins with a toothpick or cake tester about a minute before the listed time and go from there. Let them cool for about five minutes before removing them from the muffin pan.

How to Freeze Blueberry Muffins

Freeze your muffins in advance! It’s a great trick. (Not everyone wants to roll out of bed and start baking, bleary-eyed, before the coffee is even made.)

1. Make the muffin batter.
2. Portion the batter into muffin cups.
3. Freeze the whole muffin pan before storing each frozen muffin in a large freezer bag.
4. You can pop how ever many raw, frozen muffins you want to bake back into a muffin tin, then into the oven whenever you want. They will just take a few extra minutes to bake from frozen.

You can also freeze this muffins in an airtight container once they are baked and cooled. The Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins will keep in the freezer for up to three months.

This recipe was originally published on June 23, 2024 and updated April 1, 2025.