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English Muffins
1 egg, beaten separately ¾ C milk (sweet) 2 C flour Linna M. Corlett. ½ C butter 14 C sugar 14 t salt 4 level t baking powder ½ C sugar 1 C sour milk 1 egg 1 C bran
This page has come through scanning badly: the fractions have lost their slashes and two separate ingredient lists appear to have been run together, with the contributor's name landing in the middle. Read it as a skeleton rather than a set of directions.
- Read the fractions"34 C milk" is 3/4 cup, "14 C sugar" is 1/4 cup, and "14 t salt" is 1/4 teaspoon. The typesetting or the scan has dropped the solidus throughout.
- The butter quantityThe printed page was checked: the butter is half a cup against 2 cups of flour, which is what our text now gives.
- Two recipes, not oneThe trailing "1½ C sugar / 1 C sour milk / 1 egg / 1 C bran" appears to belong to a second, bran-based recipe run together with the first. It has no flour, no fat and no leavening of its own, so it is a fragment, not a formula.
- No method at allThe directions are missing entirely, as often happens in cookbooks compiled from contributors' cards. "Beaten separately" is the only clue given, and it appears to mean the egg was separated, the white beaten and folded in at the end.
- These are not griddle muffinsDespite the name, this is a baking-powder batter for muffin tins, not a yeasted dough cooked on a griddle. Nothing here would produce the open crumb and flat top of a true English muffin.
- OvenNo temperature or timing is given, as no method at all was printed. A modern baker would treat it as an ordinary muffin batter: greased tins filled about two-thirds, a moderately hot oven, roughly twenty minutes.
- Sour milkIn the bran fragment, sour milk means naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to react with soda. Buttermilk is the standing substitute; pasteurised milk left on the counter simply spoils.
- YieldTwo cups of flour with 3/4 cup milk gives roughly a dozen standard muffins.
Church fundraising cookbooks like this one were compiled from handwritten cards submitted by parishioners, set in type by a local printer, and sold to raise money for the congregation. That production chain explains almost everything odd about this page: the recipes were abbreviated to the point of shorthand because contributors were writing for neighbours who already baked, names were printed as credit lines rather than headings, and proofreading was whatever a volunteer committee managed. The title is a period habit as much as a description o have have often attached "English," "French" or "Vienna" to plain quick breads to lend them standing, and an American "English muffin" in a tin pan had drifted well away from the yeasted griddle cake sold in London bakeries.