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English Muffins
Stir flour enough into a pint of hot milk, and about a quarter of a pint of yeast to make a thin batter, then put it in a warm place to rise. Rub 2 ounces of butter into a little flour, add salt, and with more milk and flour make the batter into a stiff dough. Put it aside well covered up in a warm place for half an hour, when the dough will be quite ready to shape into muffins, but they should not be baked until they have stood for another quarter of an hour. They are easily baked in a frying-pan or on a griddle. Time to bake, twenty minutes to half an hour.
A straightforward sponge-and-dough method for griddled yeast muffins, written when every kitchen had a jug of brewer's barm and a bake-iron. Two things need translating: the yeast quantity and the word "hot".
- "Hot milk" means scalded then cooled"Hot milk" is best read as scalded then cooled -- scalding was usual with raw milk, and the milk would have been left until barely warm before the yeast went in. Yeast begins to suffer well above blood heat and dies off around 130-140F, so mix at 100-110F.
- A quarter pint of yeastThis is liquid barm skimmed from fermenting beer, roughly half a cup of thin, active slurry. For a pint of milk, substitute one packet of active dry yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons); the barm brought its own liquid as well as leaven, so expect to adjust the flour in the first stage.
- Flour "enough"For a pint (2 cups) of milk expect around 4 to 5 cups of bread flour across both stages. Note that the recipe calls for a stiff dough at the second stage, one firm enough to shape by hand, not a slack batter.
- Rising times are optimisticHalf an hour for the second rest assumes a warm brick kitchen and vigorous barm. With packet yeast allow 1 to 1 1/2 hours for the sponge and 45 minutes for the shaped muffins, judging by volume rather than the clock.
- Shaping and the griddleRoll or pat to about 3/4 inch and cut with a 3-inch cutter, or use greased crumpet rings. Dust the tops and the griddle with semolina or fine cornmeal, which is what gives the traditional gritty base.
- Heat and timingRead the 20 to 30 minutes as the total for both sides on a deliberately cool griddle; the recipe gives no temperature, but medium-low on a heavy pan (in the region of 300-325F) suits. Roughly 8 to 12 minutes a side; if the surface browns in under 5 minutes the centre will be raw. Done muffins register about 200F inside.
- SplittingTear them open with a fork rather than cutting, and only after they have cooled a little. A knife compresses the nooks that hold the butter.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve 3-inch muffins.
Griddle-baked yeast muffins were street and teatime food in Georgian and Victorian England, hawked by the muffin man with a covered tray on his head -- a trade familiar enough to be remembered in a nursery rhyme. The dough is a close cousin of the crumpet, the difference being that muffin dough is stiff enough to handle and turn while crumpet batter is poured into rings and cooked mainly on one side. Both were baked on a plate or bake-iron over the fire rather than in an oven, which suited households without an oven as well as the professional muffin baker. The name "English muffin" is largely an American coinage, distinguishing these flat yeast cakes from the sweet, chemically raised cup muffin that had come to dominate the word in the United States by the late nineteenth century.