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PUFFETS, AMERICAN (for breakfast)
Cream eight ounces of butter; add eight ounces of sugar and six eggs. Mix a pound and a half of flour with a pint and a half of milk; add the sugar, etc., a small cupful of yeast, and half a pound more flour. Let the mixture rise. Bake in patty-pans and serve hot.
A yeast-raised breakfast batter baked in small tins — closer to an English muffin batter or a raised popover than to a modern quick-bread muffin. The instructions are written for a cook who already knows what a barm batter should look like, so a few things need filling in.
- Read the order of work firstCream 8 oz butter with 8 oz sugar and beat in 6 eggs; separately whisk 1½ lb flour into 1½ pints milk; then combine the two, add the yeast, and beat in the last ½ lb flour. Total flour is 2 lb, and the result is a thick pourable batter, not a kneadable dough.
- The yeastA "small cupful of yeast" means a liquid ferment, most likely brewer's barm, which is largely water. One standard packet of dried yeast (2¼ tsp, 7 g) or 15 g fresh yeast does the same work; add a few extra tablespoons of milk to make up for the liquid you are leaving out.
- Pints and cupsCassell's is an English book, so 1½ imperial pints is 30 imperial fl oz (about 3½ US cups). If you work in US pints you will be roughly 5 fl oz short and the batter will be stiff.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet or bun tins. A twelve-hole muffin tin is the closest modern equivalent; grease it well and fill each cup no more than two-thirds, as the batter climbs.
- RisingNo time is given. At room temperature the batter needs 1 to 1½ hours, until domed and visibly bubbled; it should be stirred down gently before it goes into the tins. For a breakfast bake, mix at night, let it rise in a cool larder or the refrigerator, and bring it back to room temperature in the morning.
- OvenNone is specified. A hot but not fierce oven, 400F/200C, for 20 to 25 minutes suits a rich enriched batter of this size; the sugar and butter will colour it quickly, so check at 18 minutes.
- YieldTwo pounds of flour with a pint and a half of milk makes a large quantity — roughly 30 to 36 small puffets. Halve the whole thing for a household of four.
- Serve at onceThe instruction to serve hot is not politeness. Yeast-raised egg batters collapse and toughen as they cool, and reheating never quite restores them.
Cassell's includes many recipes labelled by national origin, and the "American" tag here points to the nineteenth-century American habit of yeast-raised breakfast breads baked in small tins — the family that includes raised muffins, Sally Lunn, and the batter breads of the eastern seaboard. Before chemical leavening became reliable and cheap, a cook who wanted bread on the breakfast table often had to set a batter with barm the night before. The word puffet may be a diminutive of puff; it appears only rarely in print and seems to have been a house or regional name for a small raised cake rather than a fixed term of art. The richness — half a pound of butter, half a pound of sugar and six eggs — marks it as a company or Sunday breakfast rather than an everyday one.