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Nellie's Muffins (Eggless)
2½ cups Five Roses flour ½ cup white sugar 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons lard 2½ teaspoons cream of tartar 1¼ teaspoons soda ½ teaspoon salt Sweet milk to make a soft dough.
Sift cream of tartar, soda and salt with the flour, rub butter and lard in flour, also sugar, and mix all together.
Roll out about 1-inch thick, spread thickly with butter and sugar, then begin at edge and roll up. Cut with a sharp knife into slices. Place slices in a buttered pan close together, sprinkle thickly with sugar, and bake. A little jelly placed on top of each before putting in oven improves them.
A contributed biscuit-dough recipe rolled and sliced like a cinnamon bun, from an era when a cook was trusted to judge liquid, oven and time for herself. Three things are missing from the text: the amount of milk, the oven temperature, and the baking time.
- The milk"Sweet milk to make a soft dough" means fresh, unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk many households also kept. For 2 cups of flour expect roughly 3/4 cup; add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds together and is soft enough to roll without cracking.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given in the recipe at all. Treat this as a rich biscuit: a hot oven, 400-425F, for about 18-22 minutes, until the tops are browned and the sugar on the pan has caramelised.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis is baking powder assembled from its parts, the older practice. The 2:1 ratio here is standard and gives roughly the lift of 5 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. Because it acts as soon as the milk goes in, mix, roll and bake without delay.
- LardLard was a common shortening in kitchens of this period and gives a tenderness butter alone does not. Modern supermarket lard behaves similarly; all butter (4 tablespoons total) works but produces a firmer, more biscuit-like crumb.
- Roll it thinner than it saysOne inch of soft dough rolled up makes a very large spiral. Roll to about 1/2 inch and a rectangle roughly 9 by 12 inches, then slice about 1 inch thick, which gives around a dozen buns.
- The filling"Spread thickly with butter and sugar" means softened, not melted, butter, or the sugar runs out of the spiral as it bakes. Soft brown sugar holds better than white and browns more kindly.
- The panSet the slices cut side up and touching, so they rise into each other and stay soft at the sides. A 9-inch round or 8-inch square pan suits this quantity. Sugar sprinkled over the tops will darken quickly at the edges.
- Eggless by designThe title is not an accident. Without egg the dough is drier and these stale fast; they are best warm from the pan the day they are made.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its Five Roses flour, and much of its contents came from Canadian housewives who sent in recipes bearing their own names. "Nellie's Muffins" is a specimen of that habit: a family formula credited only by first name. The dish itself is not a muffin in the cup-shaped sense but a rolled and sliced sweetened biscuit, close kin to the cinnamon bun and to the English Chelsea bun, made quick with cream of tartar and soda instead of yeast. The eggless note in the title reflects a real economy: eggs were seasonal and dear, especially in winter, and a cook who could raise a sweet bread without them had something worth writing down.