Muffins
INGREDIENTS. - To every quart of milk allow 1½ oz. of German yeast, a little salt; flour.
Warm the milk, add to it the yeast and mix these well together; put them into a pan and stir in sufficient flour to make the whole into a dough of rather a soft consistence; cover it over with a cloth and place it in a warm place to rise; and when light and nicely risen, divide the dough into pieces and round them to the shape with the hands; place them in MULBERRIES, PRESERVED. layer of flour about two inches thick, on wooden trays and let them rise again; when this is effected, they each will exhibit a semi-globular shape. Then place them carefully on a hot-plate or stove and bake them until they are slightly browned, turning them when they are done on one side. Muffins are not easily made, and are more generally purchased than manufactured at home. To toast them, divide the edge of the muffin all round, by pulling it open to the depth of about an inch, with the fingers. Put it on a toasting-fork and hold it before a very clear fire until one side is nicely browned, but not burnt; turn and toast it on the other. Do not toast them too quickly, as, if this be done, the middle of the muffin will not be warmed through. When done, divide them by pulling them open; butter them slightly on both sides, put them together again and cut them into halves; when sufficient are toasted and buttered, pile them on a very hot dish and send them very quickly to table.
TIME. From 20 minutes to hour to bake them.
Beeton's own verdict — that muffins "are not easily made" — comes down to one thing: this is a very wet yeasted dough cooked on a griddle, not in an oven. Get the hydration and the griddle temperature right and the rest follows.
- The hinge: a slack dough, cooked slowlyThe open, tunnelled crumb that makes a muffin worth splitting comes from a dough on the soft side and from gentle heat that lets steam blow the holes before the crust sets. A stiff dough or a hot griddle gives you a bread roll.
- Quantities, and what is missingFlour is left to the cook's judgement, as it usually is in Beeton. A quart here is an imperial quart, about 1.1 litres, and it will take several pounds of flour to bring that to a soft dough — a large batch that most people will want to scale down.
- German yeastThat is fresh compressed baker's yeast, sold in blocks and much of it once imported from the Continent. Substitute about half the weight in active dry yeast, or a third in instant.
- The stray line"MULBERRIES, PRESERVED." is a running page header from the original book that has fallen into the middle of the sentence. Read the instruction as: place the rounds on a layer of flour about two inches thick, on wooden trays.
- Hot-plate temperatureA griddle or heavy frying pan at a moderate heat, not hot, for something like 6 to 10 minutes a side; the book gives no temperature. The "20 minutes to an hour" in the original may well cover a whole tray-load rather than a single muffin.
- Rings helpA soft dough spreads. Crumpet rings or plain metal egg rings, lightly greased, will help hold the shape, though Beeton simply rounds them by hand and lets them take the semi-globular form on the tray.
- ToastingSplitting the edge with the fingers rather than a knife is the point of that whole passage: it leaves the interior torn and ragged so butter sinks in. Slow toasting is deliberate — fast heat browns the outside while the centre stays cold.
- Not an American muffinNothing here is baked in a tin or a paper case. These are griddle breads, closer to a crumpet than to a cake.
Muffins of this kind were street and teatime food in Britain long before Beeton wrote them down: the muffin man with a covered tray on his head, ringing a bell through the late afternoon, is a fixture of Georgian and Victorian London and the reason Beeton can say flatly that muffins are "more generally purchased than manufactured at home." They belong to a family of griddle breads — crumpets, pikelets and the like — cooked on a bakestone or hot-plate, and they were eaten split, toasted and swimming in butter as part of the ritual of afternoon tea that the middle classes were formalising just as this book went through its many editions. The "German yeast" of the ingredient list marks the period: compressed fresh yeast, much of it imported from the Continent, was displacing brewer's barm and homemade leavens in British kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century. The American muffin, baked in a tin and chemically raised, is a separate line of descent that borrowed the name.