Muffin Bread
3 pints of flour. 4 eggs. 1 pint of milk. 1 large tablespoonful of butter. 1 gill of yeast. A little salt. Make up at night. This makes two loaves.--Mrs. A F.
A rich overnight batter bread, closer to a soft dinner loaf than a modern muffin. The whole method rests on the long cool rise, so the recipe's one real instruction — "make up at night" — is the part to respect.
- The measuresThree pints of flour is 6 cups; a pint of milk is 2 cups. A gill is half a cup. "A large tablespoonful" was not a standardised measure and may well have been more generous than a modern level tablespoon, so allow a little extra butter.
- The yeastA gill means half a cup of liquid homemade yeast or brewer's barm, generally thinner and less reliable than modern yeast. Roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast will do the same work; if you use it, make up the missing half-cup of liquid with a little extra milk or water.
- Overnight riseMix the batter at night and leave it covered at cool room temperature, around 65-68F, for 8 to 10 hours. Warmer than that and the dough over-proofs and sours by morning. A modern kitchen at 75F will need less yeast or a spot in the refrigerator.
- Scald the milk, or don'tMany nineteenth-century recipes scalded milk and cooled it before adding yeast, though this one does not say so. With pasteurized milk it is unnecessary -- just bring it to lukewarm, no hotter than 110F, so the yeast survives.
- BakingThe original gives no oven, which was standard when heat was judged by hand. Two loaves in pans bake at 375F for 35 to 45 minutes, to an internal temperature of 190F.
- YieldTwo loaves. Enriched with four eggs and butter, the crumb is tender; it is best the day it is baked, and good toasted the next.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of these one-line recipes signed with initials: they were written by cooks for cooks who already knew the technique and needed only the proportions. "Muffin bread" belongs to the large Southern family of soft, egg-enriched raised breads meant for the breakfast table, where hot bread was a point of pride and something fresh from the oven appeared at every meal. The name reflects an older sense of muffin — a yeast-raised batter cooked in rings on a griddle, as English muffins still are — and this recipe is the same idea taken to the loaf pan. The gill of yeast is the clearest mark of its date: before packaged yeast reached most kitchens, a household kept a liquid ferment going from batch to batch, and measured it by the cupful rather than the spoonful.