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Breakfast Muffins
Stir flour enough into a pint of hot milk, and about a quarter of a pint of yeast, to make a thin batter, then put it in a warm place to rise. Rub two ounces of butter into a little flour, add salt, and with more milk and flour make the batter into a stiff dough. Put it aside, well covered up, in a warm place for half an hour, when the dough will be quite ready to shape into muffins, but they should not be baked until they have stood for another quarter of an hour. They are easily baked in a frying-pan or on a griddle. Time to bake, twenty minutes to half an hour.
A yeast-raised griddle bread in the English sense, not the cupcake-shaped American muffin. The instructions are terse in the way Victorian bread recipes usually are, and one line needs correcting outright.
- Hot milk will kill the yeastScald the milk if you like, but let it fall to blood heat, about 100-110F, before the yeast goes anywhere near it. Milk above roughly 130F kills the culture and the batter will never rise.
- A quarter of a pint of yeastThis means liquid brewer's or barm yeast, which was sold wet and was far weaker than modern dry yeast. Substitute about 2 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast, and account for the missing 5 fl oz of liquid by using the full milk quantity.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2.5 US cups of milk. Two ounces of butter is half a stick.
- Flour is left to your judgementNo weight is given anywhere, which is normal for the period. Add it by feel in two stages: a thin pouring batter first, then a soft, slack dough that just holds a shape. Given a pint of milk, a quarter pint of yeast and further milk besides, the total flour will be considerable, so go by consistency rather than a fixed measure.
- The sponge stageThe first rise is a sponge and wants an hour or more in a warm place until it is bubbled and smells faintly sour. The half hour given later applies only to the second, stiffened dough.
- Keep the dough wetThe recipe calls for a stiff dough, but the open, holey crumb that makes a muffin worth splitting comes from a slacker dough handled lightly. Worked stiff and smooth like a loaf, it tends toward a dense scone instead.
- Griddle heat and ringsCook on a dry or barely greased griddle over moderate heat; if you want a figure to work to, somewhere around 325-350F suits, though the recipe gives none. The dough is shaped by hand here, but crumpet rings or plain metal rings will help hold the shape. Twenty to thirty minutes total, as given, suits this thickness, turned once or twice, and the muffins should be pale gold rather than browned.
- Yield and servingThe yield depends entirely on how much flour and milk you end up adding; expect a dozen or more of about three inches. They are traditionally torn or split around the equator with the fingers rather than cut, then toasted and buttered.
The muffin meant here is the flat, ring-shaped griddle bread that survives in Britain as the muffin and in America as the English muffin. Through the nineteenth century they seem to have been more often bought than baked at home: muffin men worked London streets with covered trays and a handbell in the late afternoon, a trade familiar enough to have left its mark in the nursery rhyme, and street bell-ringing of this kind is said to have been curbed by mid-century police regulation. Recipes like this one suggest household manuals teaching middle-class kitchens to make at home what had previously come from a specialist baker, which would account for the method being a full baker's sponge-and-dough. The overlap in names is a separate development: the American muffin, raised with soda or baking powder and baked in cups, took the word in a different direction.