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Imperial Muffins
1 cup scalded milk 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/3 yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm water 1 3/4 cups flour 1 cup corn meal 1/4 cup butter Add sugar and salt to milk; when lukewarm add dissolved yeast cake, and one and one-fourth cups flour. Cover, and let rise until light, then add corn meal, remaining flour, and butter. Let rise over night; in the morning fill buttered muffin rings two-thirds full; let rise until rings are full and bake thirty minutes in hot oven.
Milk Toast I 1 pint scalded milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 1/2 tablespoons bread flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons cold water 6 slices dry toast Add cold water gradually to flour to make a smooth, thin paste. Add to milk, stirring constantly until thickened, cover, and cook twenty minutes; then add salt and butter in small pieces. Dip slices of toast separately in sauce; when soft, remove to serving dish. Pour remaining sauce over all.
A yeast-raised cornmeal muffin baked in rings, mixed as a sponge in the evening and baked in the morning. The proportions are sound; only the yeast, the vessel and the oven need translating.
- The yeast quantity is deliberateOne-third of a yeast cake is roughly half a teaspoon of active dry or instant yeast. It looks like too little because the dough is meant to ferment slowly for eight to twelve hours at room temperature; increasing it gives an overblown, sour batter by morning.
- "Hot oven"Read this as 400-425F. Thirty minutes is right at the low end of that range for full-size muffins, but start checking at twenty-two minutes -- they are done when the tops are set and browned and the centers read about 200F.
- Muffin ringsThese were straight-sided metal bands set on a greased baking sheet. A buttered standard 12-cup muffin tin works, filled two-thirds and left to rise level with the rim; English muffin rings on a sheet pan give the flatter original shape.
- Scalding the milkPasteurized milk does not need scalding for keeping quality, but heating it does deactivate proteins that slacken yeast dough, and it softens the cornmeal. Whichever you do, cool to 100-110F before the yeast goes in or the rise stalls.
- Cornmeal grind"Corn meal" here means a fine or medium meal, yellow or white, rather than a coarse polenta grind or the degerminated instant kind. Coarse meal is likely to stay gritty over a single overnight soak.
- Adding the butterHave the quarter cup of butter soft, not melted, and work it in after the sponge has risen and the cornmeal and remaining flour are in. Fat added at the start slows fermentation noticeably in a dough this lightly yeasted.
- Overnight temperatureA cool room, 65-68F, suits the long rise. In a warm kitchen the dough will be spent by morning; refrigerate it after an hour or two and let it come back to room temperature before filling the rings.
- YieldAbout twelve muffins. They are best split and toasted, and are likely to stale quickly.
Cornmeal breads leavened with yeast rather than baking powder sit between two traditions: the English muffin, baked in rings on a griddle, and American cornbread. Recipes of this sort turn up in turn-of-the-century cookery school books, where an overnight sponge was a familiar method -- the evening's work produced the morning's bread. Why the recipe calls for only a fraction of a yeast cake is not stated. The name "imperial" carries no fixed meaning here; names of this kind were sometimes attached to enriched or supposedly superior versions of plain dishes, but nothing in the recipe explains the choice.