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English Muffins
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 cup lukewarm water 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 4 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 6 cups sifted flour 1 teaspoonful salt Make your afternoon tea or Sunday supper "events" by serving these tempting muffins with marmalade or rich golden honey. They are the acme of deliciousness when split and toasted on a griddle.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm liquid, add lard or butter and three cups of flour. Beat until smooth, add rest of flour, or enough to make a soft dough, and the salt. Knead until smooth and elastic or "throw and roll". Place in well-greased bowl, cover and set aside in warm place to rise. When double in bulk, which should be in about two hours, form with hand into twelve, large, round biscuits. Cover and set aside for about one-half hour. Then, with rolling-pin, roll to about one-fourth inch in thickness, keeping them round. Have ungreased griddle hot and bake ten minutes. Brown on both sides. As they brown, move to cooler part of stove, where they will bake more slowly, keeping them warm in the oven until all are baked.
A griddle bread rather than an oven one, and the method assumes a stove top with hot and cool regions on it. The dough is soft, the shaping is free-hand, and the heat is the thing to get right.
- Lower and slower than the booklet saysA hot griddle for ten minutes, then a move to a cooler part of the stove, is an instruction written for a coal or wood range, which had both. A flat modern burner has one temperature at a time. Set the pan over medium-low from the start and allow considerably longer than ten minutes. If the outsides brown while the centers are still raw, finish them in a moderate oven.
- Ungreased is correctThe griddle takes no fat at all. The dough already carries four tablespoons of lard or butter, and a greased surface fries the outside before the inside has cooked. Dry, well-seasoned cast iron is what this wants.
- Rings, if the shape mattersNothing in the method confines the dough. Rolled rounds spread as they heat, so these come out wider and flatter than a packaged English muffin. Crumpet or muffin rings hold straight sides for anyone who wants them.
- Let them recover after rollingRolling to a quarter inch drives most of the gas out of the rounds, and the recipe sends them to the griddle immediately afterward. Twenty minutes of rest between the rolling pin and the pan gives the crumb a chance to open again. Without it the texture lands nearer a soft biscuit than the holed interior these are now known for.
- Split with a forkA knife cuts the open crumb flat. Working a fork around the circumference and pulling the halves apart leaves the torn surface that catches butter, which is the whole point of the bread.
The instruction to move the muffins to a cooler part of the stove dates this page more precisely than anything else on it. It belongs to a range heated by coal or wood, where the top was fierce above the firebox and gentle at the far end, and a cook slid a pan across that gradient the way a modern cook turns a dial. The booklet puts these at afternoon tea and Sunday supper rather than at breakfast, split and toasted and eaten with marmalade or honey — roughly the position the muffin held in Britain, where it was a tea-table griddle bread. The American reassignment to the breakfast plate came later and is noted at the foot of this page.