Raised Muffins
2 cups milk 1 cup melted butter 1 teaspoon salt yeast cake + cup sugar 2 eggs 1 cup lukewarm water 3 to 4 cups flour Mix milk, butter, sugar and salt; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast and enough flour to make a drop batter. Let rise over night. In morning add eggs, yolks and whites beaten separately. Place buttered muffin rings on buttered griddle or dripping pan; fill rings two thirds full, and cook on griddle on top of stove or in dripping pan in oven.
An overnight yeast batter cooked in rings, closer to an English muffin than to the quick-bread muffin the name now suggests. Two of the quantities as printed need judgment before you start.
- The butter is almost certainly a misprintThe butter looks like a misprint -- a full cup of melted butter against 2 cups milk and 3 to 4 cups flour would make a very rich, greasy batter. 1/4 cup is the sensible reading, and may be what the original fraction was before it dropped out.
- The sugar line is garbled"yeast cake + cup sugar" appears to be a fraction lost in the type. Read it as one yeast cake and a modest amount of sugar, perhaps 1/4 cup; the exact figure cannot be recovered from the text as printed.
- Yeast cake equivalentCompressed yeast cakes of the period varied in size; taken as the modern 0.6 oz cake, that is roughly one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast. Dissolve it in the cup of lukewarm water, 105-110F, not in the hot milk mixture.
- Lukewarm means lukewarmThe warmed milk, butter and sugar must come down to about 100F before the yeast goes in. Much above 120F the yeast is stressed, and at 130-140F it dies and the overnight rise never happens.
- Drop batterThicker than pancake batter, thin enough to fall from a spoon in a lump rather than pour in a ribbon. Start at 3 cups flour and add toward 4 only until it behaves that way.
- Overnight rise, cool roomA batter left 8 to 12 hours in a modern heated kitchen will over-ferment and taste sour. Set it in the coolest part of the house, around 65F, covered.
- Muffin ringsThese are the straight-sided metal English muffin or crumpet rings, about 3 1/2 inches across and 1 inch deep, not a muffin tin. Buttered tuna-can rings with both ends removed work the same way.
- Heat and timingOn the stovetop keep the griddle at a steady medium-low, about 325-350F, and allow 6 to 8 minutes a side; the batter must set through before the outside colors. In the oven, use a buttered sheet pan at 400F for 15 to 20 minutes.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 muffins in 3 1/2-inch rings. Like English muffins, they take well to splitting and toasting.
Alongside the American "muffin" made as a baking-powder cake in a cup-shaped tin, the word also meant this: a slack yeast batter fermented overnight and cooked in rings on a griddle, the same family as the English muffin and the crumpet. The overnight sponge was a practical arrangement in a household where the cook set the batter after supper and had breakfast bread with almost no morning work, and it produces the open, holey crumb that makes the split-and-toast habit worth keeping. The recipe assumes griddle rings without explanation, and it also offers the alternative of a dripping pan in the oven. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, and although it is remembered for its chocolate work, its bread chapter is a straightforward record of ordinary New England household baking.