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Muffins (Quart of flour eggs beaten)
1 quart of flour. 6 eggs, beaten very light. 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. 2 tablespoonfuls of yeast.--Mrs. Dr. E.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in nineteenth-century Virginia books, written for a cook who already knew what muffin batter should look like. Two things are simply missing: the liquid and the method.
- A quart of flourMeasured by volume, a quart is 4 cups, somewhere around a pound to a pound and two ounces of soft Southern flour. Modern all-purpose is stronger; a blend of all-purpose with a little cake flour is closer to what Mrs. Dr. E. had.
- The missing liquidNo milk or water is listed, and the recipe cannot work without it. A yeast-raised muffin batter of this type takes roughly 1½ to 2 cups of warm milk, but the amount is genuinely absent from the original rather than merely implied.
- Two tablespoonfuls of yeastThis means homemade liquid yeast — a potato or hop barm kept in a jug — not granulated yeast. Two tablespoons of barm is not equivalent to two tablespoons of modern dry yeast, which would be a wildly excessive dose for a quart of flour.
- These are not cupcake muffinsIn 1878 a muffin was generally a yeast-leavened bread, commonly baked in metal rings on a griddle in the manner of the English muffin, though period books also bake muffins in pans. A batter of this type is loose, closer to thick pancake batter than dough.
- RisingBatter set with barm was often mixed at night and baked at breakfast. Judge by the batter — it should be visibly domed, bubbled and smelling faintly sour — not by the clock.
- Six eggsPeriod eggs ran smaller than today's large, so five large eggs may be nearer the original weight. 'Beaten very light' means beaten until foamy and airy; the recipe does not say whether the whites were separated.
- CookingGriddle over medium-low heat, rings greased, about 6-8 minutes a side until the sides are set and the tops dry. The original gives no oven direction. Split them with a fork rather than a knife.
- YieldA quart of flour gives roughly 16 to 18 muffins in 3-inch rings.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is a collective book: receipts often carry the initials of the Virginia housewife who supplied it, and "Mrs. Dr. E." is one of many contributors identified only by married title. The format may go some way toward explaining the shorthand — notes traded between women who had all made muffins many times, rather than instructions for a beginner. The muffin is likely of the English griddle sort, raised with barm saved from brewing or from a potato ferment kept alive on the kitchen shelf, and it belonged firmly to breakfast in a house where hot bread was expected at every meal. Chemical leavening was widely available by 1878, and the book carries plenty of soda-and-buttermilk breads, but yeast muffins persisted because the long overnight rise gave a flavor and an open, tearing crumb that saleratus could not.