Home › Bread and Bread Making › Queen of Muffins
Queen of Muffins
1/4 cup butter 1/3 cup sugar 1 egg 1/2 cup milk (scant) 1 1/2 cups flour 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder Mix and bake same as Twin Mountain Muffins.
A small creamed-butter muffin batter, written for a cook who already knows the Twin Mountain Muffin method a page or two earlier. The method is the whole recipe, so it is worth spelling out.
- The referenced methodTwin Mountain Muffins are made by creaming the butter with the sugar, beating in the egg, then adding the milk and the flour sifted with the baking powder. Mix only until the dry flour disappears; overworking gives tunnels and a tough crumb.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. Around 400-425F is about right for muffins of this type: twenty to twenty-five minutes in greased tins, until a skewer comes out clean.
- No salt listedThe omission is typical of the period, when salted butter was assumed. If you use unsalted butter, add a scant 1/4 teaspoon of salt with the flour.
- Scant milk"Scant" means just under the line, roughly 7 tablespoons. The batter should drop heavily from a spoon rather than pour; add the last of the milk only if it seems stiff.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period may well have been softer than modern all-purpose. Spoon the flour into the cup and level it rather than scooping, or the muffins come out dry.
- Baking powderTwo and a half teaspoons to a cup and a half of flour is a heavy hand by current standards but not unreasonable for a batter with only one egg. Older single-acting powders lost strength on the shelf; with modern double-acting powder you can drop to two teaspoons without harm.
- YieldAbout nine standard muffins, or a dozen small ones. Best eaten the day they are baked.
Muffin recipes in American cookbooks of this era divide into two families: the yeast-raised griddle muffin, cooked in rings, and the chemically leavened tin muffin that this one belongs to. Cheap, reliable baking powder helped make the second kind a breakfast staple, and books of the 1890s and 1900s print them in long runs of near-identical formulas distinguished largely by the ratio of butter to sugar. Twin Mountain Muffins, the recipe this one leans on, was a well-known example of the type. "Queen" as a recipe name is often taken to signal a richer version of a plain thing -- more butter, more sugar, an egg -- as with queen cakes and queen of puddings.