Home › The Principles of Cookery › Potato Muffins
Potato Muffins
Scoop the inside from four large freshly-baked potatoes. Beat this flour until it is quite smooth, and add to it a pinch of salt, two ounces of clarified butter, and as much warm water as will make a thin batter. Beat three eggs, and add them to the mixture, together with three pints of best flour. Dissolve a tea-spoonful of soda in a pint of lukewarm water, knead this with a cupful of fresh yeast into the dough, and let it rise all night. The next morning bake the muffins in rings upon a griddle, and when one side is lightly browned, turn them upon the other. When to be eaten, tear each muffin a little round the edge, toast it on both sides, divide, butter, and afterwards quarter it. Time to bake the muffins, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1d. each.
A yeast-raised griddle muffin enriched with baked potato, from the era when muffins were a bakehouse product bought by the dozen and toasted at home. The text has an obvious slip in the second sentence: what you beat smooth is the potato flesh, not flour.
- The hinge: use the potato hot and dryScoop the flesh from potatoes straight out of the oven and mash or rice it while steaming, so it takes up water rather than turning gluey. Baked, not boiled, is deliberate — the drier crumb is what keeps the dough from becoming slack.
- "Three pints of best flour"Flour was sold and measured by volume; three imperial pints of flour comes to roughly 1 lb 14 oz to 2 lb, or about 7 cups of plain white flour. Treat it as a starting point and hold some back, since the potato varies in how much liquid it absorbs.
- The yeast is the real problem"A cupful of fresh yeast" most likely means barm, the wet, foamy, variably active liquid skimmed from brewing, though compressed German yeast was also on sale by this date. Either way it is not interchangeable with modern yeast by volume. For this quantity of flour, roughly 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast, or about 3/4 oz of fresh compressed yeast, is a sane equivalent.
- Cut back the liquidBetween the warm water in the potato batter and the pint used to dissolve the soda, the original is very wet by modern standards, and the flour of the day may have taken up more water than modern flour does. Add water gradually to a soft, sticky-but-kneadable dough; a pint of liquid total, plus what the potato holds, is usually enough.
- Soda alongside yeastThe teaspoon of soda is probably insurance and a flavour softener, since a long overnight fermentation on barm could turn a sponge sour. With modern yeast and a cool overnight rise there is little acid for it to react with, so it can be left out.
- Overnight rise"Let it rise all night" assumed an unheated kitchen. In a warm modern room the dough may over-prove; refrigerate it and let it come back to room temperature in the morning before shaping.
- Rings and griddle heatMuffin rings are simply metal bands around 3 1/2 inches across, greased and set on the griddle; crumpet rings or egg rings work. Cook on a griddle or heavy pan at low-moderate heat for 8-10 minutes a side. Twenty minutes total is consistent with the recipe, and the muffins should stay pale with only a light browning, as the text's "lightly browned" implies — a hot pan gives you a raw middle.
- The serving ritualTearing the edge, toasting whole, then splitting is the standard instruction in Victorian cookery books: it keeps the interior moist and gives the torn, honeycombed surface that soaks up butter. Cutting them through with a knife before toasting compresses the crumb.
- YieldNo count is given. At a penny each and this quantity of flour, expect 14 to 18 muffins.
Cassell's comes from a period when English muffins were still commonly bought rather than made at home — the muffin man with his covered tray and handbell was a familiar London street figure into the later nineteenth century, and in many households the job was the toasting rather than the baking. The instruction to tear the muffin round its edge and toast it whole before splitting is the usual direction of the period's cookery books. Potato in a wheat dough was a thrifty and practical addition long before it was a fashionable one: the starch holds moisture, so the muffins stay soft longer, and where flour was a significant household expense the potato stretched it. The "cupful of fresh yeast" points to a kitchen getting barm from a brewery or a neighbouring baker rather than buying a packet, though compressed yeast was also available by this date.