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B. F. Muffins
1 cup hot milk 1 cup breakfast food ½ cup rolled oats ½ cup Five Roses flour (sifted) 1 cake compressed yeast ¼ cup lukewarm water 3 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt.
Boil oats and butter in a cup of milk one minute, let stand until lukewarm.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in ¼ cup lukewarm water, and combine the two mixtures. Add cereal, flour and salt. Beat well. The batter should be thick enough to drop heavily from the spoon. Cover and let rise until light (about one hour) in a moderately warm place. Fill wellgreased muffin pans two-thirds full. Let rise about 40 minutes, bake 24 minutes in moderately hot oven.
A yeast-raised muffin rather than a baking-powder one, from the era when Canadian mills published cookbooks to sell flour. The title abbreviates "breakfast food," which is the vague part of the ingredient list and the thing worth settling first.
- What "breakfast food" meansIn this period the phrase meant a packaged cereal — flaked wheat, cornflakes, crumbled shredded wheat, or a granular wheat cereal such as Cream of Wheat — though it could also be used loosely of cooked cereals. Use 1 cup of a plain unsweetened flake or granular cereal; sweetened modern cereals will throw the sugar off.
- Compressed yeastA cake is usually reckoned at about 0.6 oz, though period cakes came in more than one size. Substitute roughly 2¼ teaspoons (one envelope) of active dry or instant yeast, dissolved as directed in the ¼ cup lukewarm water with the sugar.
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" in this period is 375–400°F. Bake at 400°F for the stated 24 minutes and check at 20.
- The flourFive Roses was a hard-wheat bread flour. Modern all-purpose works, though bread flour gives a slightly better rise in a batter this wet.
- Watch the milk temperatureThe hinge of the recipe. Let the oats-and-butter mixture cool to genuinely lukewarm — about 110°F or below — before the yeast goes in; much hotter and the yeast is damaged or killed and nothing rises. Allow time for it to cool properly.
- Rolled oats, one minuteA one-minute boil in milk only softens the oats; it does not cook them to porridge. That is intentional — they finish hydrating during the two rises.
- Batter consistency"Thick enough to drop heavily from the spoon" is the test to trust over the measurements, since dry cereals absorb wildly different amounts of liquid. Add a spoonful more flour or milk to reach it.
- The second riseDo not skip the 40 minutes in the tins. This is a batter bread, not a quick muffin, and the oven gives no chemical lift of its own.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins. Best warm the day they are made; yeast muffins with this little fat stale quickly.
Yeast-raised muffins like this sit at the tail end of a long tradition — before chemical leaveners took over North American baking in the later nineteenth century, a "muffin" was normally a yeast batter cooked in rings or tins, closer to a crumpet or an English muffin than to today's cake-like versions. What dates this particular recipe is the phrase "breakfast food," a catch-all for the packaged cereals that flooded the market after the 1890s from Battle Creek and its many imitators; cookbooks of the 1910s routinely offered ways to use up the box, including stirring stale flakes into bread and muffin batters. The Five Roses Cook Book itself was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households, its recipes contributed largely by home cooks.