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English Muffins
4 cups Gold Medal flour 1 1/2 cups lukewarm water 1 teaspoon salt 2/3 yeast cake dissolved in 1/3 cup cold water Add the salt and the dissolved yeast cake to the warm water and gradually stir in the flour. Beat the dough thoroughly. Cover and let rise in a warm place for five hours. Shape the dough on a floured board into balls about twice as large as an egg, flatten to one-third of an inch thick. Lay these on a warm griddle which has been lightly greased and let them rise slowly. As soon as they have risen a little increase the heat and cook slowly, turning often. They should take twenty minutes to rise and fifteen minutes to bake. Tear them apart and butter while hot.--Miss Parloa.
A plain three-ingredient griddle bread from the era when muffins were cooked on the stovetop rather than baked. Two things need translating: the yeast and the griddle heat.
- The yeast cakeCompressed yeast came in several sizes, so "2/3 yeast cake" is genuinely ambiguous — anything from a fraction of a 0.6 oz cake to a piece of a 2 oz block. For a five-hour rise at room temperature, about 1 teaspoon of active dry or 3/4 teaspoon instant yeast is in the right range; more will exhaust the dough before you shape it.
- The dough is wetter than you expectFour cups of flour against about 1 5/6 cups total water (1 1/2 cups plus the 1/3 cup the yeast is dissolved in) puts this near 85-90 percent hydration. It will be a slack, sticky mass rather than a kneadable dough. Use a well-floured board and a bench scraper, and resist adding much extra flour — the loose crumb with its large holes depends on that water.
- Griddle temperatureLow and steady; in practice something in the region of 300-325F suits, though the recipe only says to increase the heat and cook slowly. Too hot and the outside sets before the centre cooks, leaving a gummy band through the middle. Fifteen minutes total with frequent turning matches the recipe's own timing for a muffin a third of an inch thick; thicker rounds need proportionally longer.
- Proofing on the griddleThe instruction to let them rise on the warm griddle is deliberate — gentle bottom heat wakes the yeast without cooking the dough. Keep the surface barely warm to the hand for those twenty minutes, then bring the heat up.
- Rings are optionalNothing here calls for muffin rings, and free-form rounds spread a little as they proof. If you want the straight-sided commercial shape, greased 3 1/2-inch rings on the griddle will hold them.
- Tear, do not cutNot sentiment. Splitting with a fork or by hand leaves the ragged interior surface that catches butter; a knife shears the holes flat.
- YieldBalls twice the size of an egg from this quantity give roughly ten to twelve muffins.
- A note on the flourGold Medal was a hard spring-wheat flour. Modern all-purpose works, but bread flour gives a chewier crumb closer to the original intent.
Miss Parloa is Maria Parloa, one of the founders of the Boston Cooking School and among the most widely read American cookery writers of the late nineteenth century; her name attached to a recipe in a flour company's promotional book was worth a great deal to the miller. The muffin itself belongs to the older griddle-bread tradition — a yeasted dough cooked on a hot plate rather than in an oven, which mattered in households where the range fire was easier to control on top than inside. In Britain such muffins were carried through the streets by the muffin man, a trade well attested in Victorian London, and the "English" qualifier in American books served to distinguish them from the sweet, chemically leavened cake muffins that by this date had taken over the word on this side of the Atlantic. The five-hour rise is the mark of a kitchen that treated bread as an all-day background task rather than a project.