Raised Muffins
4 cups Gold Medal flour 2 cups scaled milk 1 tablespoon sugar 1 yeast cake 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 eggs Put the salt, sugar and butter into a mixing bowl, scald with the milk. When lukewarm add the yeast broken in bits; stir to dissolve the yeast and make a sponge with 3 cups of flour, beat well. When light add the eggs well beaten and 1 cup of flour; raise until light. Bake in greased gem pans or rings in a quick oven for twenty or twenty-five minutes.
A yeast-raised batter bread rather than a chemically leavened muffin, closer to a light dinner roll baked in a muffin tin. The batter is soft and beaten, never kneaded.
- Yeast cakeOne yeast cake of this era equals roughly one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry yeast, or about 17 g fresh compressed yeast. Crumble it into the milk only once the liquid has cooled to lukewarm, around 105-110F, or the heat will kill it.
- Scalded milkScalding is often explained as deactivating something in raw milk that weakens gluten, though it was also simply how unpasteurised milk was handled. With pasteurized milk it is optional, but heating it does dissolve the butter and sugar neatly, as the recipe intends.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-425F. At that heat 20-25 minutes suits standard muffin cups; check at 18 minutes if your pans are shallow gem pans.
- Gem pans and ringsGem pans were heavy cast iron muffin tins, made in a variety of cup shapes, oval and oblong being common. A modern 12-cup muffin tin works; grease it well, as this batter is sticky and there is no paper liner in the original scheme.
- The sponge stageThree cups of flour beaten into the milk makes a thick batter that must rise until visibly domed and bubbly, roughly an hour in a warm kitchen. Adding the eggs before the sponge is light gives a heavy, close-grained muffin.
- Second riseAfter the eggs and last cup of flour go in, let it rise again until light, another 45 minutes to an hour, then spoon into the pans. Some cooks prefer to fill the pans first and let them rise there; both work, but the batter is too slack to shape by hand.
- FlourGold Medal was a hard spring wheat flour, so all-purpose or bread flour is the right substitute. Measure by scooping and leveling, about 480-500 g for four cups.
- YieldRoughly 18 to 24 standard muffins, fewer if the gem cups are large. Best eaten warm the day they are baked; the crumb stales quickly, as with most enriched batter breads.
Gold Medal Flour cookbooks were promotional literature issued by the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the firm that later became General Mills, and they were designed to show off the milling company's hard spring wheat flour in every form a housewife might want. This recipe belongs to an older tradition than the name suggests: before baking powder became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century, many "muffins" were yeast-raised, and the word covered everything from griddle-baked English muffins to soft batter breads baked in iron gem pans. Cast-iron gem pans were sold in numerous patterns from the later nineteenth century onward and were especially popular in America. The two-stage sponge method here, with a batter set to rise before eggs are beaten in, was a common approach in the days of less predictable yeast.