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Twin Mountain Muffins
1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 egg 1 cup milk 2 cups bread flour 5 teaspoons baking powder Cream the butter; add sugar and egg well beaten; sift baking powder with flour, and add to the first mixture, alternating with milk. Bake in buttered tin gem pans twenty-five minutes.
One Egg Muffins I 3 1/2 cups flour 6 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 1/3 cups milk 3 tablespoons melted butter 1 egg 3 tablespoons sugar Mix and sift dry ingredients; add gradually milk, egg well beaten, and melted butter. Bake in buttered gem pans twenty-five minutes. If iron pans are used they must be previously heated. This recipe makes thirty muffins. Use half the proportions given and a small egg, if half the number is required.
A straightforward creamed-butter muffin from the era when every kitchen had cast-iron gem pans. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows her oven, so the two things it leaves out are the temperature and the yield.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Muffins of this type bake at 400-425F; twenty-five minutes at that heat suits a standard muffin cup, and small gem cups will be done nearer eighteen to twenty minutes.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin tin, usually with smaller, deeper cups than a modern one. A twelve-cup steel muffin tin works; if you use iron, heat and butter it before the batter goes in, as the second recipe on the page notes.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons to two cups of flour is well above what a modern cook would use, roughly one and a half to two times the usual proportion. Period powders were single-acting and their formulations varied; with current powder this proportion may give a coarse crumb and a detectable aftertaste, so reducing it is worth considering.
- Bread flourCalled for specifically here. Milling and flour strength have changed since, and all-purpose flour will give a tenderer muffin if the bread-flour version comes out tough.
- MixingAlternating flour and milk into the creamed butter is right, but stop the moment the flour disappears. Beating a chemically leavened muffin batter smooth is what produces tunnels and a tough crumb.
- YieldAbout twelve standard muffins, or fifteen to eighteen in small gem cups. They are best within an hour of baking and go stale quickly, as plain quick breads do.
"Twin Mountain" muffins appear in American cookbooks from the 1890s onward. The name is traditionally linked to the Twin Mountain House, one of the White Mountain resort hotels in New Hampshire, though the connection is not documented. The recipe belongs to the era of chemical leavening, when baking powder was largely replacing saleratus and sour milk in household baking and hot bread could be put on the table without waiting on yeast. Its place in a bread chapter alongside the plainer one-egg muffin fits the domestic-science habit of teaching one method and then varying the richness by egg, butter and sugar.