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Parker House Muffins
Boil one quart of milk. When nearly cool stir in one quart sifted flour, one teaspoonful salt, one half cup of yeast. Then stir in three well beaten eggs. Let it rise in a warm place in winter and a cool one in summer, eight or ten hours. When risen light, stir in one tablespoonful melted butter and bake in iron muffin moulds.--Mrs. W. H. M.
A yeast-raised batter, not a modern chemically leavened muffin — closer to a crumpet or an English muffin baked in gem pans. Plan the overnight rise before anything else.
- The half cup of yeastThis means homemade liquid yeast or barm, a thin ferment of potato water, hops or flour, not compressed cake yeast. About 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast is the usual working equivalent, slaked in a little of the warm milk; the missing half cup of liquid can be made up with extra milk.
- Milk temperature"Boil... when nearly cool" is scalding. Scalded milk was long held to give a better-textured yeast batter, an effect usually attributed to denaturing a whey protein that weakens gluten; with modern pasteurised milk it is not necessary. Either way the milk must be lukewarm, no more than about 110F, before the yeast goes in — hotter milk will damage the yeast.
- The batter is thinA quart of milk to a quart of sifted flour (roughly 4 cups milk to about 16 oz flour) gives a pourable batter, not a dough. It should be ladled into the pans, and it will look alarmingly loose. That is correct.
- Rise timeEight to ten hours assumes a home-brewed yeast of unpredictable strength and an unheated house. With modern yeast in a 70F kitchen the batter will be light and bubbly in three to four hours; overnight in the refrigerator also works. Judge by the surface — domed, foaming, faintly sour — not the clock.
- Iron muffin mouldsCast-iron gem pans, which were heated in the oven and greased before the batter went in. A heavy muffin tin preheated in the oven and brushed with butter gives the same crisp shell; the batter should hiss when it hits the metal.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range judged by hand. Bake at 425F for about 20 minutes, until well risen and browned. A slower oven lets the thin batter spread and set flat.
- Stir the butter in gentlyThe melted butter goes in after the rise. Fold it through with as few strokes as will incorporate it — knocking all the gas out of a risen batter leaves you with pancakes in cups.
- YieldAround 18 to 24 standard muffins. They are best within an hour of baking; the next day they want splitting and toasting.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of recipes carrying the names of hotels and other households — a form of culinary name-dropping that shows how far the reputation of a good table travelled. The Parker House, opened by Harvey D. Parker in Boston in the 1850s, was famous chiefly for its folded dinner rolls, and its name attached itself to a range of breads that may or may not have had anything to do with the hotel's kitchen. What is genuinely of the period here is the method: a breakfast bread of this kind meant a yeast batter set the night before, leavened with a homemade liquid yeast the cook kept going from batch to batch, and baked in cast-iron gem pans. Some of the book's recipes are signed with the contributor's initials rather than her full name.