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Cream Muffins
1 pint thin sweet cream 3 fresh eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons (level) sugar Five Roses flour to make stiff batter. cream.
Beat eggs light, add salt, sugar and Add flour until it becomes a stiff batter. Grease muffin pans, fill and bake in quick oven.
Note on Muffins-Muffins may also be baked in rings on a griddle, and many prefer this method to baking in the oven.
As the muffins cook and stiffen, slip off the rings and let them finish. Muffins with yeast recipe will take about 5 minutes longer to bake properly than with baking powder.
The typesetting in this entry has slipped: the ingredient list runs into the method, so the words "cream. Beat eggs light, add salt, sugar and" belong together as the first step. Read it as: beat the eggs until light, add salt, sugar and cream, then work in flour to a stiff batter.
- The pintFive Roses was milled in Canada, where a pint is 20 fluid ounces "" about 2 1/2 cups. If you work from a US pint of 2 cups the batter will simply need less flour.-
- Thin sweet cream"Sweet" means unsoured, not sugared, and "thin" means the lightest grade of cream. Table or light cream (18%) is the closest match; half-and-half also works. Heavy whipping cream is far richer than intended and will make the muffins greasy.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Have the pans greased before the batter goes in, and expect 15-20 minutes for standard muffin cups.
- Flour is not measured"Stiff batter" here means a batter that mounds on the spoon rather than pours. The quantity is not recorded, so add it in stages and stop when it holds its shape. Overshooting gives dry, tunnelled muffins.
- Order of mixingWhisk the baking powder into the last of the flour rather than adding it to the liquid, and stir only until the flour disappears. The leavening starts working on contact with the cream.
- Griddle ringsThe note describes English-muffin technique: greased metal rings on a moderate griddle. The instruction to slip the rings off once the muffins have set lets the crumb finish cooking through.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives "" which is why entries like this one arrive with an ingredient list, a fragment of a method and a helpful aside from someone who preferred her muffins done on the griddle. The note is a reminder that "muffin" was still an unsettled word in the early twentieth century: the griddle-and-ring version is the older English sense, a yeast-raised bread cooked on a hot plate, while the baking-powder batter baked in gem pans is the North American quick bread that eventually took over the name entirely. A recipe built on a full pint of cream also says something about the households that sent these in: on a farm with a separator, cream was the cheap ingredient and the one you had too much of in summer.