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Muffins
Make a dough of rather soft consistency with warm milk, allowing to every quart of milk an ounce and a half of German yeast, which should be first mixed with the milk; add the beaten whites of two eggs, and cover the dough closely before the fire to rise. When ready, drop the quantity of dough required for one muffin upon a well-floured board, and form it into shape by turning it round with the hand, then slide it upon the hot plate. To make and bake muffins well is a difficult task, and as they are to be obtained at any respectable baker's, there are, unless for families living far from town, very few home-made muffins. Time, twenty to thirty minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. for this quantity. Sufficient, four pounds of flour. MUFFINS (another way.) (See BREAKFAST MUFFINS.)
A griddle bread, not a cake baked in a tin: this is the English muffin, cooked on a hot plate and later split and toasted. The instructions assume a baker's bakestone and a cook who already knows the dough.
- The hinge: soft dough, hot plate, gentle heatThe dough should be slack enough to slump if left alone, and the plate hot but not fierce. Too hot and the crust sets before the crumb opens into the coarse, cavernous texture that makes a muffin worth splitting.
- German yeastFresh compressed yeast, sold in blocks and generally said to be so called because much of the early supply came from Germany and Austria. An ounce and a half is about 42 g; substitute roughly a third of that weight in instant dried yeast.
- The proportions are incompleteA quart of milk to four pounds of flour would give an ordinary bread dough, not the "rather soft consistency" called for, and no salt is mentioned at all. Treat the milk figure as the basis for the yeast measurement rather than a full formula, and expect to add liquid until the dough is genuinely slack.
- Hot plateA flat iron plate over the fire. A heavy cast-iron pan or an electric griddle works; crumpet or muffin rings help the rounds hold shape but are not essential if the dough is well floured.
- Twenty to thirty minutesThat is the total time given. On a domestic griddle expect roughly 6 to 8 minutes a side, turning once, until both faces are pale gold and the sides feel dry and set.
- Whites onlyThe two beaten whites lighten the dough without enriching it. Do not substitute whole eggs, which push the crumb towards a soft dinner roll.
- YieldFour pounds of flour makes several dozen muffins, which is bakery scale. Quarter the recipe for a household batch.
- Probable cost1s. 6d. is one shilling and sixpence for the whole quantity.
Cassell's is unusually frank here: muffins were a baker's product, bought rather than made, and the entry exists chiefly so a reader far from a shop could attempt them. The muffin man crying his wares with a tray on his head and a handbell was a fixture of nineteenth-century English towns, and the muffin was firmly a tea-table and breakfast food, toasted after splitting round its equator with the fingers rather than a knife o keep the ragged interior intact — though that last refinement is traditional lore rather than documented practice. "German yeast" dates the recipe: compressed cake yeast reached British kitchens in quantity in the second half of the century and gradually displaced brewers' barm, which was unreliable, bitter and dependent on a nearby brewery. Muffins of this kind are still griddle-cooked commercially, and the American term "English muffin" arose to distinguish them from the quite different sweet batter cake baked in cups.