Puffit
One half cup sugar, one half cup butter, three eggs, two heaping teaspoons cream-tarter, one teaspoon soda, one pint sweet milk, three pints flour, a little salt. Rub cream-tarter and butter into the flour, dissolve the soda in a little hot water, beat the eggs light, and mix all together. This makes two long tins. Bake in quick oven, it will bake in twenty minutes or half an hour.
A plain chemically-leavened breakfast loaf, mixed by the biscuit method rather than creamed. The proportions are workable as written once the old volume measures are translated.
- Pints into cupsA pint here is two cups: three pints of flour is 6 cups, one pint of milk is 2 cups. Scaled down by half it makes a single loaf.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk, named to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that many recipes of the period called for. Whole milk is the direct substitute.
- The leaveningTwo heaping teaspoons cream of tartar with one teaspoon soda is a home-mixed baking powder, in about the right 2:1 ratio. If you would rather use commercial baking powder, about 4 teaspoons replaces both, and the hot-water step is then unnecessary.
- Dissolving the sodaSoda dissolved in a little hot water goes in last and starts reacting at once. Mix quickly, get the batter into the tins and into the oven without delay, or the lift is spent before it bakes.
- Rub, do not creamThe butter is rubbed into the flour along with the cream of tartar, as for biscuits, which is why the crumb is short and tender rather than cakey. Keep the butter cool and work it to coarse crumbs before the liquids go in.
- Quick ovenAbout 400-425F. Twenty to thirty minutes suits two shallow loaf tins; test with a skewer at twenty and expect the full half hour if your tins are deep.
- Long tinsLoaf tins, greased. A shallower pan gives the fast rise and browning the recipe assumes.
- Yield and servingTwo loaves. Best warm from the oven with butter; it is better fresh than kept, and better toasted the next day.
"Puffit" belongs to the large family of American quick breads that appeared once cream of tartar and soda became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century, letting a cook put a hot loaf on the breakfast table in half an hour rather than waiting on yeast overnight. The name appears to be descriptive rather than regional, likely one of the many homely coinages found in community and family cookbooks of the period. The American breakfast of the era expected something freshly baked and hot, and recipes like this one, mixed by the biscuit method with butter rubbed into the flour, were the fastest way to supply it. The separate cream of tartar and soda, rather than a single tin of baking powder, suggest a recipe belonging to the years when many households are said to have still compounded their own leavening.