Apple Puffs
Mix together 1 pint of flour, ½ teaspoonful of salt, 1 tablespoonful of sugar and 2 scant teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Beat 1 egg, add to it 3/4 of a cupful of milk. Stir this into the dry mixture with 2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter and more milk, if necessary, to make a very thick batter. Have ready a number of tart apples cored, pared and cut in eighths. Half fill muffin cups with the batter, lay over it some pieces of apple, sprinkle with spiced sugar (1 teaspoonful of powdered cinnamon and a pinch of cloves to 1/2 cupful of sugar), cover with more batter and press a number of pieces of apple over the top. Sprinkle thickly with the sugar and bake for half an hour in a hot oven. with a soft sauce.
A plain muffin batter layered with apple and spiced sugar — the sort of dessert that turns a bowl of flour and one egg into twelve servings. Two things need attention: the volume measure for flour and the oven.
- A pint of flourDry ingredients were commonly measured by liquid capacity, so a pint means 2 cups, roughly 8-9 oz of all-purpose flour scooped lightly. Spoon it into the cup rather than packing it, or the batter will be stiff enough to resist the apple.
- "A hot oven"In period usage this generally meant somewhere around 400-450F. Half an hour at the top of that range will dry out a muffin; bake at 400F and start testing at 20 minutes, allowing up to 30 if the cups are deep and heavily loaded with fruit.
- Baking powderTwo scant teaspoons to 2 cups of flour is on the low side by modern practice, where 1 teaspoon per cup is standard. The older tartrate and phosphate powders were single-acting and worked hard the moment liquid hit them, so get the filled cups into the oven promptly.
- "A very thick batter"This is the hinge. The batter has to be stiff enough to sit under and over the apple slices without flowing around them — closer to a drop biscuit dough than a pourable muffin batter. Add the extra milk a spoonful at a time and stop while it still holds a shape on the spoon.
- The applesTart, firm cooking apples that hold their shape: Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Bramley. Cut in eighths they will still have some bite at 30 minutes; slice thinner if you want them fully soft.
- Spiced sugarThe half cup specified may make more than the batch needs, though the recipe does call for sprinkling the tops thickly. Use what you want between the layers and on top, and keep any that is left for toast or oatmeal.
- Soft sauceThe trailing phrase means a pouring sauce rather than the firm creamed-butter "hard sauce" of the same era — a thin vanilla or lemon sauce, or plain cream. Serve the puffs warm.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffin cups. Grease them well; the sugar sprinkled on top caramelizes at the rim and sticks.
"Puff" in nineteenth-century American cookery was a loose term for anything small, individual, and risen — sometimes a fried batter, sometimes a baked one, and by the end of the century very often a muffin-cup affair like this one. What places this version broadly in its period is the baking powder: chemical leavening became cheap and reliable in American kitchens after the 1860s, and it let a household produce a hot dessert in half an hour without yeast, without a long creaming of butter and sugar, and on one egg. That economy is the point — flour, milk, a single egg, two tablespoons of butter, and whatever apples were on hand feed a table of six. Layering fruit inside a batter with cinnamon-and-clove sugar is much older than the leavening, and belongs to the same family as the apple charlottes, slumps and cobblers that turned a barrel of winter keeping apples into something worth eating in February.