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Egg Muffins
2 cups flour 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon sugar 1 scant cup milk 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 egg Rub the butter in the flour; add the dry ingredients and mix well. Beat the egg; put it in a tin measuring cup and fill up the cup with milk. Stir this into the flour and when thoroughly mixed, fill buttered gem pans and bake in a quick oven until golden brown. The batter is very stiff and the top of the muffins when baked should be rough.
A plain baking-powder muffin of the sort turned out daily in American kitchens before the First World War. The method is short but two of its instructions carry more weight than they appear to.
- The egg-in-the-cup trickThe egg is beaten, dropped into a one-cup measure, and milk added to bring the total to a scant cup. The egg and milk together make the liquid, so do not add a full cup of milk on top of the egg or the batter will be far too slack.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin with small, deep cups, round or oval depending on the pattern. An ordinary muffin tin will do; this quantity of batter should make roughly ten to twelve. The recipe asks only that the pans be buttered.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F, at which expect something like 15 to 20 minutes. A moderate oven will give a pale, flat muffin rather than the rough, risen top described.
- Rubbing in the butterOne tablespoon of butter worked into two cups of flour with the fingertips is a very lean mix by modern standards. Work quickly so the fat stays in small flakes; the result is closer to a biscuit crumb than a creamed batter.
- The stiff batter is deliberateThe note that the batter is very stiff and the tops should be rough is the hinge of the recipe. A smooth, domed top means the batter was too wet or was beaten too long. Mix only until the flour disappears.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to two cups of flour is standard for modern double-acting powder, so no adjustment is needed. Get the pans into the oven promptly once the liquid goes in.
- Yield and servingTen to twelve small muffins. Best eaten hot from the pan with butter; quick breads of this kind stale quickly.
- Filed oddlyThis page sits under Frozen Desserts. Nothing about the recipe is frozen or a dessert.
Egg muffins belong to the family of quick breads that reliable chemical leavening encouraged from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. Earlier, a muffin was more often a yeast-raised batter cake; with a powder on the shelf, a cook could put hot bread on the table in well under an hour. Loose-leaf cookbooks were sold as binders with replaceable pages, which may account for a plain muffin turning up among the ices.