Sift 1 pint of flour with 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder; beat three yolks of eggs with a pinch of salt; add 1 pint of cream and 1 tablespoonful of melted butter. Stir in the flour; add the whites beaten to a stiff froth. Beat all well together. Fill the muffin-rings ½ full and bake in a quick oven for twenty minutes.
A rich, thin batter leavened mostly by beaten egg whites rather than chemical leavening. The measurements are by volume in the old style, which needs translating before you start.
- A pint of flourDry goods were measured by the pint cup, so this is 2 cups of all-purpose flour, roughly 8-9 oz. Do not read it as a liquid pint by weight.
- A pint of cream2 cups. Cream in this period was not standardised and was often thinner than modern heavy whipping cream, so light or single cream is the safer reading; heavy whipping cream gives a heavier, greasier muffin.
- A quick ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 400-425F. At that heat twenty minutes is about right for standard muffin cups; check at fifteen.
- The whites are the leaveningOne teaspoon of baking powder for two cups of flour is little by modern standards. The lift comes from the stiffly beaten whites, so fold them in rather than beating them flat, despite the instruction to "beat all well together."
- Muffin ringsThese were metal hoops set on a greased baking sheet or a hot griddle, not the cup tins we use now. A buttered muffin tin filled half full stands in perfectly well.
- Batter consistencyEqual volumes of flour and cream give a pourable batter, closer to a thick popover mix than a stiff American muffin dough. That is correct; do not thicken it.
- YieldThe batter is generous, and half-filled cups will give appreciably more than a dozen. Best eaten hot from the oven, as they collapse and toughen once cool.
Muffins baked in rings sit on the line between a griddle bread and an oven cake, and the ring itself is often said to be the survival of an older method in which batter was cooked on a hot iron plate rather than in a tin. This version is a rich one: cream in place of milk and a high proportion of egg. Books like this one, which offered a dish a day from a different country, worked with broad national labels rather than documented regional recipes, and the attribution should be read as a nineteenth-century cook's shorthand rather than evidence of Scottish origin. The reliance on beaten whites for lift, with only a token teaspoon of baking powder, places the recipe in the transitional period when chemical leaveners were common but cooks still trusted their arms.