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Muffins (Quart of flour pint milk eggs)
1 quart of flour. 1 pint milk. 3 eggs. 1 heaping tablespoonful lard. 1 " " butter. 1/2 cup yeast. 1 teaspoonful sugar.
Mix and beat till perfectly light.--Mrs. W. S.
Another Recipe for Muffins.
One quart of milk, one dozen eggs, one pound of butter. Beat the butter and yolks together. Beat the whites to a stiff froth. Make the batter the consistency of pound cake, and bake in snow-ball cups as soon as made.--Mrs.
Two separate muffin batters run together on one page. The first is a yeast-raised batter of the older sort, closer to what we now call an English muffin; the second is a rich egg batter with no flour quantity given at all, baked immediately in small tin cups.
- The hinge: these are not quick breadsNeither recipe uses baking powder or soda. The first rises on yeast and needs hours, not minutes; the second rises entirely on a dozen beaten egg whites and must go into the oven the moment it is mixed, as the instruction "as soon as made" insists.
- A quart of flourThis recipe measures flour by volume: a quart is 4 cups, which period tables reckon at roughly 1 lb of soft Southern flour. Unbleached all-purpose works; a low-protein or pastry flour is nearer the original.
- Half a cup of yeastThis means liquid homemade yeast or barm, not granules. Modern equivalent is about 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons instant yeast, but you must add back the liquid the barm supplied or the batter will be too stiff to beat light.
- No rising time is given"Beat till perfectly light" describes the batter, not the fermentation. Expect a slack batter to double in 1 1/2 to 2 hours at room temperature before baking; the recipe names no pan or ring.
- The second recipe's missing flourThere is genuinely no flour quantity here. "The consistency of pound cake" batter is the only guide, and any figure quoted for it would be invented. Treat it as a formula for a cook who already knew the feel of the batter.
- Snow-ball cupsSmall deep tin cups of the sort used for individual baked or boiled puddings. A popover pan, dariole moulds, or small metal ramekins give a comparable tall shape; a shallow modern muffin tin does not.
- Oven heatNeither gives a temperature. An egg-raised batter of this kind wants a hot oven, 400-425F, so the structure sets before the whites collapse. Yeast muffins of this period were often cooked on a griddle in rings over moderate heat and turned once, though this recipe does not say so.
- ScaleA quart of milk, a dozen eggs and a pound of butter is a large-household quantity. Quartering the second recipe gives a manageable batch of eight to ten cups.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathers contributions from named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why these two unrelated muffin batters sit side by side over two different signatures. "Muffin" in this period could still mean the yeast-raised, griddle-cooked bread of British tradition, split and toasted at breakfast or tea, though baked cup muffins were already current -- the second recipe here is one. Chemically leavened muffins gained ground as commercial baking powder spread through American kitchens from the 1860s onward. The half-cup of yeast in the first recipe points to a household keeping a live barm or bottled homemade yeast, refreshed with potato water or hops, since reliable packaged yeast was not yet a given. The second recipe, with its dozen eggs and pound of butter, belongs to an older tradition still, in which eggs did the lifting.