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Cream Muffins
Sift together 2cups pasty flour 1 tablespoon baking power 2 teaspoon sugar and 1/2 teaspoon salt. With fingers rub in 1/4 cup butter or margarine, add 2 eggs well beaten and 7/8 cup thin cream. Mix thoroughly, pour into greased muffin pans or small fancy shaped tins and bake 123 minutes at 400 degree F., and 5 minutes at 45 degrees F. Makes 16 small muffins.
A rich quick-bread batter that behaves like a plain cake. The transcription carries two obvious typesetting errors in the baking line, so treat the times and temperatures as the first thing to sort out.
- The baking instruction is garbled"123 minutes at 400 degree F., and 5 minutes at 45 degrees F." cannot be right; 123 minutes and 45F are both impossible figures. One plausible reading is about 12 minutes at 400F plus about 5 minutes at a higher setting (450F), though the order may equally have been reversed, and the true intent cannot be recovered from the text. In practice, small muffins of this size are done in 15 to 20 minutes total at 400F, when the tops spring back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Thin creamPeriod books generally distinguish thin cream (a light, coffee-type cream, commonly cited around 18 to 20 percent fat) from thick or heavy cream. Modern light cream is the closest equivalent; half-and-half will do where light cream is unavailable. Do not substitute heavy cream without slackening the batter, as the muffins will be greasy and heavy.
- 7/8 cupFourteen tablespoons, or one cup less two tablespoons.
- Pastry flour"Pasty flour" is a typo for pastry flour, a soft low-protein flour that gives a tender crumb. All-purpose works, or use a mix of all-purpose and cake flour in roughly equal parts for a closer texture.
- Rubbing in the fatWorking the butter into the dry ingredients with the fingertips, rather than creaming it, is what gives these muffins their short, biscuit-like crumb. Keep the butter cool and stop when the mixture looks like coarse meal.
- Mixing"Mix thoroughly" is the one direction to disregard. Combine the beaten eggs and cream and fold them in only until the flour disappears; overworking a baking-powder batter produces tunnels and a tough, peaked muffin.
- Baking powderOne tablespoon for two cups of flour is generous by modern guidelines (usually about 1 to 1.25 teaspoons per cup), though not out of range for a rich batter; old baking powders also varied in strength. Modern double-acting powder is reliable, so use the full measure and get the pans into the oven promptly.
- Yield and pansSixteen small muffins means gem-pan size, roughly two-inch cups. A standard twelve-cup muffin tin will give twelve larger muffins that need a few extra minutes.
Cream muffins belong to the American quick-bread family that expanded once chemical leavening became cheap and dependable in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before that, a "muffin" in English usage meant a yeast-raised griddle cake; the baked, baking-powder version cooked in cast-iron gem pans is largely an American development, and cookbooks of the period list many variations distinguished mainly by the liquid used, whether milk, sour milk, buttermilk or, as here, cream. The richness of this formula, with cream, butter and two eggs, suggests something more festive than everyday breakfast baking. The offhand "or margarine" suggests a date late enough for margarine to be an unremarkable domestic substitute.