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Muffins (One cup sugar two eggs one)
One cup sugar, two eggs, one pint milk, one and one-half teaspoons of salt, one heaping tablespoon butter, three heaping teaspoons baking powder, flour to make stiffer than cake; bake in rings or small tins.
MRS. D. M. PosT.
A sweet quick-bread batter of the kind that filled community cookbooks around 1900, written for a cook who already knew what muffin batter should look like. The only real difficulty is the flour, which is given by feel rather than by measure.
- The flour is the whole recipe"Flour to make stiffer than cake" is the hinge. With a pint of milk, one cup of sugar and two eggs, expect somewhere in the range of 3 1/2 to 4 cups of flour, but add it gradually and stop when the batter drops thickly from the spoon rather than pouring. This is genuinely a judgment call in the original and no exact conversion can be honestly supplied.
- Mix as little as possibleBaking powder batters toughen when beaten smooth. Stir only until the flour disappears; a few lumps are correct and produce a lighter crumb than a well-beaten batter will.
- Oven heatThe receipt gives none. Quick breads of this sweetness bake at 400F for about 18 to 22 minutes for standard muffin cups, less for small tins.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. The recipe assumes whole milk; anything lower in fat makes a drier muffin, since the butter here is minimal.
- One heaping tablespoon butterBarely an ounce of fat for a batter this size, which is why these read as closer to a plain sweet bread than a modern bakery muffin. They stale quickly and are meant to be eaten warm.
- The saltOne and one-half teaspoons is more than most modern recipes use for this quantity of flour. A scant teaspoon will suit many palates, especially if you are using salted butter.
- "Bake in rings"Muffin rings are shallow metal hoops, set on a greased griddle or baking sheet so the batter spreads to the ring and rises straight. Ordinary muffin tins do the same work; if you use rings, grease both ring and sheet well.
- YieldRoughly 18 to 24 standard muffins, or a larger number of the small tins the period favored.
Community cookbooks of this kind were commonly assembled by church and village committees, each contributor signing her name to a receipt she had made often enough to trust; that a cook such as Mrs. Post would have known the consistency by eye is one likely reason the flour goes unmeasured here. The direction to "bake in rings" points back to an older practice, when muffins were often cooked in hoops on a griddle rather than in the gem pans and muffin tins that were becoming common by the end of the nineteenth century. The full cup of sugar puts this closer to a sweet tea-table muffin than to a plain breakfast bread.