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Breakfast Muffins
They Two quarts of bread sponge, five tablespoonfuls of lard or butter, two eggs, three teaspoonfuls of baking powder, a little salt. Bake in muffin rings.
This is a batter-bread recipe that assumes you already have bread dough underway — the sponge does most of the leavening, with baking powder for insurance. Everything hinges on catching the sponge while it is still lively.
- What bread sponge isA soft, batter-like preferment of flour, water and yeast, set the night before as the first stage of the day's bread. Use it when it is domed and bubbling but before it collapses and turns sour; a sponge past its peak gives flat, sharp-tasting muffins.
- Two quarts is a large batchTwo quarts of sponge is roughly 4 lb of soft batter and will fill upwards of two dozen muffin rings. Halve or quarter the whole recipe proportionally for a household batch.
- Muffin ringsBottomless metal rings, about 3 to 3 1/2 inches across and an inch deep, greased and set on a heavy griddle or a flat baking sheet. English crumpet rings are the same thing; greased tuna-can bands or a standard muffin tin will stand in, though the shape will be taller.
- No oven temperature is givenThe recipe says only 'bake in muffin rings'. If baking rings on a sheet, a hot oven of around 400-425F suits the batter, roughly 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are set and pale gold; this is a modern suggestion, not the book's.
- Or bake them on the rangeThe older method is to set the filled rings on a moderately hot greased griddle, cook until the bottoms are brown and the tops look dry, then turn rings and all and finish the second side. Muffins of this type were commonly cooked on the griddle rather than in an oven.
- Lard or butterFive tablespoons for two quarts of sponge is a modest enrichment. The recipe allows either: lard gives a tenderer, more neutral crumb, butter browns faster, so watch the bottoms. Melt and cool it before beating it in so it does not knock the sponge down.
- Adding the eggs and powderThe recipe gives no method; beat the eggs and fat in first, then fold the baking powder and salt through last and get the batter into the rings without dawdling, since much of the powder's lift begins as soon as it wets.
- ConsistencyAim for a thick drop batter that mounds on the spoon and settles slowly. Fill the rings about two-thirds; a stiff sponge may need a spoonful of milk, a slack one a little more flour.
Muffins of this kind belong to the griddle: the yeast-raised round baked in a ring, split and toasted, is the ancestor of today's English muffin, though by the later nineteenth century American cookbooks were also using 'muffin' for quick, tin-baked kinds. The recipe's real subject is thrift. In a house that mixed bread by hand, sponge was often standing ready, and a cook who wanted something better than plain bread for breakfast could dip out a measure and enrich it with eggs and fat. The three teaspoonfuls of baking powder suggest a later date: chemical leavens became cheap and dependable over the second half of the century, and cooks seem, at least in some kitchens, to have hedged their yeast with them.