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Muffins (One pint sweet milk one)
One pint sweet milk, one tablespoon melted butter, two tablespoons yeast, two eggs, one and one half pints flour, a little salt.
An ingredient list with no method, which was normal in books of this kind — the cook was expected to know what to do with a yeast batter. These are griddle muffins of the English-muffin type, not the cupcake-shaped quick bread the word now suggests.
- The measurementsOne pint of milk is 2 cups. One and a half pints of flour is a volume measure, roughly 3 cups, or about 12 to 13 oz by weight. The result should be a thick pouring batter rather than a kneadable dough.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have called for saleratus instead of yeast. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Two tablespoons yeastThis means liquid yeast — homemade barm or a purchased compressed-yeast cake dissolved in water — and it does not convert cleanly. About 1 teaspoon of active dry or instant yeast will raise this quantity of batter; more will only make it sour.
- The eggs go in lastThe eggs -- The recipe gives no method. Yeast batters of this kind were often mixed with the milk, flour, salt and yeast and left to rise until light and bubbling, with the beaten eggs and melted butter stirred in before baking, though period sources vary on when the eggs were added.
- Rising timeOne to two hours in a warm room, or overnight in the refrigerator (a modern convenience; a nineteenth-century cook would have set the batter overnight in a cool place). The batter is ready when it is domed, full of bubbles, and smells faintly of beer.
- How to bake themGrease muffin rings on a griddle over moderate heat — about 325F on an electric griddle — fill them half full, and cook 6 to 8 minutes a side until deep gold. Failing rings, bake in a greased gem or muffin pan at 400F for 15 to 20 minutes.
- Split, do not sliceGriddle muffins are pulled apart with a fork or the fingers while hot, which leaves the ragged interior that holds butter. Cutting them with a knife compresses the crumb.
- YieldEnough batter for about a dozen 3-inch muffins, or 8 to 10 servings at breakfast. They are best the day they are made and toast well the next morning.
The title is often explained as an artifact of indexing: a household collection might carry six or eight recipes all called "Muffins," so each was identified by its opening words — though the opening-words tag may equally be a product of later cataloguing. This one belongs to the older tradition, in which a muffin was a yeast-raised batter baked in metal rings on a griddle — the ancestor of what Americans now call the English muffin. Chemical leavening changed that. As baking powder became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century, the word "muffin" drifted toward the quick, sweetened, cup-shaped bread, and recipes like this one were gradually relabeled or dropped. The method suits a morning: a batter set to rise the night before could be griddled to order, giving hot bread without lighting the oven at daybreak.