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Crumpets
Warm one pint of new milk and one ounce of butter in a saucepan; when the butter melts, take it from the fire, let it cool a little, and mix with it a beaten egg, a pinch of salt, and flour enough to make it into a batter; lastly, put with it a quarter of a pint of fresh yeast. Cover it, and let it stand in a warm place for a quarter of an hour. Bake the crumpets slightly on an iron plate made for the purpose, and well greased. If this is not at hand, they may be baked in the frying-pan. When one side appears sufficiently cooked turn them quickly on the other. Crumpets may, however, be bought for a trifling expense, and as they take a good deal of trouble to prepare, it does not seem worth while to make them at home when they can be purchased. They should be toasted and plentifully buttered; they will be soft and woolly, and rather like a blanket soaked in butter. Time to bake, about ten minutes. Probable cost, 1/2d. each. Allow two for each person.
A batter recipe from the days when every kitchen had a bakestone and a supply of brewer's barm. Two things in the original will trip up a modern cook: the yeast quantity and the rising time.
- The quarter-pint of yeastThis is liquid brewer's barm, skimmed off fermenting beer, not anything sold today. Substitute about 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast (one 7 g sachet), whisked into the warm milk.
- Rising timeA quarter of an hour was enough for vigorous barm; it is not enough for dried yeast, and it is the reason home crumpets often come out solid. Let the batter stand covered in a warm place until it is domed, foaming and smells faintly of beer — 1 to 1½ hours.
- Flour "enough to make a batter"The book gives no weight because the target is a consistency: a slack, pourable batter roughly the thickness of double cream, not a dough. For a pint (US: 2½ cups) of milk this lands somewhere around 12-14 oz of plain flour, added gradually.
- The holesThe characteristic honeycomb comes from a batter loose enough for gas bubbles to rise and burst at the surface. If it is stiff, the bubbles are trapped and you get a muffin. Many later recipes beat in a pinch of bicarbonate of soda dissolved in warm water just before cooking to guarantee it.
- "An iron plate made for the purpose"A griddle or bakestone. The book does not mention rings, but a batter this slack needs something to hold it: greased crumpet or egg rings on a heavy cast-iron pan. Without rings the batter spreads.
- Heat and turningModerate heat; too high and the base sets before the bubbles can climb. The book's "about ten minutes" is its total baking time: cook until the top is dry and pitted, then turn quickly and give the second side only long enough to colour.
- New milkSimply fresh whole milk, as opposed to skimmed or the previous day's. Whole milk is the right choice.
- YieldCassell's allows two per person; a pint of milk gives roughly ten to twelve crumpets of about 3 inches. They are meant to be cooked, cooled, then toasted and buttered before eating.
Cassell's is unusually frank here: the entry is really an argument for buying crumpets rather than making them, which tells you how thoroughly the baker's trade had taken over yeast-raised goods in late Victorian Britain. Barm — the live froth from a brewery — was the household leaven for centuries, and a cook who no longer had a brewer next door was at a real disadvantage against a bakehouse that did. The name's origin is disputed; it is often connected with the older crompid cake, a curled or bent griddle cake recorded in medieval English, and to the Welsh crempog, though the link is traditional rather than settled. By the 1800s the crumpet had generally become a griddle-baked, holed batter cake distinct from the muffin, sold cheaply by the piece and eaten toasted — hence the compiler's halfpenny each. The closing description, "rather like a blanket soaked in butter," reads as appreciative rather than critical.