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Wheat Muffins
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1/4 cup lukewarm water 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 2 eggs 2 cups sifted flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt Muffins made by this recipe stand for a treat whether served at breakfast, luncheon or tea.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm liquid. Add the lard or butter, eggs beaten until light, and flour to make a moderately stiff batter, then add the salt, and beat until smooth. Cover and set aside in warm place for about one hour. When risen, fill well-greased muffin tins half full. Cover and let rise again for about half an hour. Bake twenty minutes in a hot oven.
The simplest thing in this part of the booklet. A yeast batter beaten until smooth, risen once in the bowl and once in the tins, with no kneading and no shaping at all.
- Batter, not doughTwo cups of flour against a cup of milk, a quarter cup of water and two eggs. It is beaten rather than kneaded, and the tin does all the shaping. The description — moderately stiff batter — matters more than the flour figure, since flours vary.
- Beat the eggs firstThe instruction to beat the two eggs until light is doing part of the leavening work, and it is easy to skip. A whisk until they are pale and thickened, before they go into the yeast mixture, is what the recipe means.
- Half full, then let it reach the topThe tins are filled half full and the batter rises on its own to the rim before baking. Filling them higher at the start is the usual way this recipe goes wrong, and the muffins spill over the edges and set there.
- An hour is a guide, not a ruleYeast batters move with the temperature of the room. Look for a surface that has domed and gone visibly bubbly rather than counting minutes, both in the bowl and in the tins.
- Hot oven, twenty minutesAbout 400°F (200°C). With only two tablespoons of sugar in the whole batch these will not brown deeply; go by firmness at the centre and by the muffins coming away from the tin cleanly.
Two quite different things called muffins sit a few pages apart in this booklet. The English muffin is a yeast-raised round cooked on a griddle and split after baking; the American muffin is a batter baked in a tin, and by this period it was generally raised with baking powder. This recipe is the older arrangement of the American one: a batter, baked in tins, but leavened with yeast and given the better part of two hours to do it. Chemical leavening is what eventually made the muffin a quick bread, and a page like this shows the slower form still in print, kept there by a company with every reason to keep it there.