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Muffins
2 cups bread flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons melted butter 1 teaspoon salt Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add the milk slowly and the melted butter. Bake in moderate oven in buttered gem pans. Let them stand in the oven after baking, with the door ajar, that the crust may be dry and crisp.
A plain, eggless, sugarless muffin of the sort meant to be split and buttered alongside a meal rather than eaten as a sweet. The batter is thin and comes together in under a minute, so have the pans hot and greased before you start mixing.
- Gem pansGem pans are the cast-iron muffin pans of the period, with shallow oval or round cups. Any 12-cup muffin tin works; if you have cast iron, heat it in the oven and butter it just before filling, which gives the crisp brown edge the recipe is after.
- Oven temperature"Moderate" in books of this era is usually read as somewhere around 350-375F, though the term was never precise. Quick breads of this type rise better at 400-425F: the higher heat sets the crust before the leavening is spent.
- Bread flourBread flour here means a strong white wheat flour. It works, though all-purpose gives a more tender crumb in a batter with no egg to bind it.
- Mix as little as possibleThis is the hinge. With no egg and no sugar, overbeating develops the gluten in the bread flour and the muffins turn tough and tunnelled. Stir only until the flour is damp; lumps are correct.
- The door-ajar stepLeaving them in the cooling oven with the door open drives off surface steam so the crust stays crisp instead of softening in the pan. Five to ten minutes is enough; longer and they dry out.
- Yield and servingAbout 12 small muffins or 9 standard ones, baked in 18-22 minutes. Unsweetened, they are meant for the dinner table with butter, or with jam at breakfast.
The muffin here is the American type rather than the English griddle muffin: a chemically leavened batter baked in cups, made possible by the commercial baking powders that spread through home kitchens after the mid-nineteenth century. "Gem" was the common name for the heavy cast-iron pans sold for them, and gem is still used interchangeably with muffin in recipes of this vintage.