Take 1 quart of warm milk, ½ cup of yeast, 1 teaspoonful of salt and flour enough to make a stiff batter; let stand to raise until light. Then add ½ cup of melted butter, 1 teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little water; add enough flour to make a very stiff batter and let raise half an hour. Then fill well-greased muffin-rings half full with the batter and bake in a quick oven until done. Serve with butter.
A full-sized yeast batter from an era when a household baked in quantity and kept a jar of liquid yeast on hand. The method works, but two of its measurements need translating before you start.
- The yeast is not modern yeastA half cup of yeast here means liquid barm or a home-brewed potato/hop yeast, far weaker than anything sold today. One packet of active dry yeast (2¼ teaspoons) proofed in a little of the warm milk will raise this quantity of batter.
- Scale it downA quart of milk plus the flour it takes to stiffen it yields something on the order of two to three dozen muffins. Quartering the recipe — 1 cup milk, ¼ teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons melted butter — gives a manageable batch.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400–425°F. Muffin rings on a heavy sheet or, better, on a preheated griddle or cast-iron pan set in the oven, so the bottoms set quickly.
- The soda has a jobThe teaspoon of soda is not leavening in the usual sense. A long, slack rise on wild or homemade yeast turns sour, and the soda neutralises that acidity and gives the second rise a lift. With modern yeast and a short rise the batter will not be acidic; use a scant ¼ teaspoon for a quarter batch or leave it out.
- "Stiff batter" means spoonable, not kneadableThis is a batter bread, thicker than pancake batter and slack enough to drop from a spoon into the rings. If you can knead it, you have added too much flour and the crumb will be tight rather than open and holey.
- Muffin ringsPlain metal rings about 3½ inches across and 1 inch deep; greased tuna cans with both ends removed or metal egg rings do the same work. Grease them well and grease again between batches, as this batter sticks.
- FinishingBaked rather than griddled, they will not have the two toasted faces of a shop muffin. Turn them once the tops set, or split and toast them before buttering, which is how the open crumb is meant to be eaten.
The English muffin belongs to a family of griddle breads — crumpets, pikelets, Welsh bakestone cakes — cooked in shallow rings on a hot plate rather than in an oven, a practical technique in kitchens where the fire was reliable and the oven was not. In Victorian London the muffin man carrying a covered tray was a fixture of the late afternoon, and the muffins were sold to be split, toasted and buttered for tea. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks took up the rings and the batter but frequently sent them to the oven instead, as this recipe does, which is why the instruction reads "bake" where an English original would say griddle. Here it appears in a book of dishes of all nations, filed under a country.