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English Muffins
1 cake compressed yeast 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 cup lukewarm water 1 teaspoon salt 2 level tablespoons sugar 4 tablespoons melted lard 6 cups sifted flour Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the lukewarm liquid; add lard (or butter), and three cups of flour. Beat until smooth; add rest of flour, or enough to make a soft dough, and last, the salt. Knead until smooth and elastic; place in well-greased bowl; cover and set aside in a warm place to rise. When double in bulk, which should be in about two hours, form with hand in twelve large, round biscuits. Cover and set aside for about one half hour. Then, with rolling pin, roll to about one fourth inch in thickness, keeping them round. Have ungreased griddle hot and bake ten minutes. Brown on both sides. As they brown, move to cooler part of stove, where they will bake more slowly, keeping them warm in the oven until all are baked. They can be reheated in this way or split and toasted on the griddle. These muffins are delicious served hot with plenty of butter.
A straightforward yeasted griddle bread. The only real technical demands are the hydration of the dough and the heat of the griddle, both of which the original leaves to judgment.
- The yeast cakeOne cake of compressed yeast is about 0.6 oz of fresh yeast, equivalent to roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast. Dissolving it with the sugar in the lukewarm liquid works for all three; keep the liquid at 100-110F so the scalded milk does not kill it.
- Lukewarm, preciselyThe scalded milk must be cooled to blood heat before it meets the yeast. Scalding is a holdover from the days of unpasteurized milk; it was held to remove something in raw milk that weakened the dough. With today's pasteurized milk you can skip the boil and simply warm it.
- Flour by feel, not by cupSix cups of sifted flour is a starting figure. Sifted flour weighs less than scooped, so measure light or work by weight (about 21-24 oz) and hold back the last half cup until the dough is soft but not sticky.
- Salt lastAdding the salt after most of the flour, as written, is deliberate: undissolved salt in direct contact with yeast slows it. It makes little difference with modern yeast, but the sequence does no harm.
- Griddle heat is the hingeThe original leaves this to judgment: a moderate, ungreased griddle, not a searing one. Too hot and the outside sets dark before the crumb cooks through, leaving a raw center; too cool and they dry out. Test with one muffin first and adjust before committing the batch.
- Ten minutes means five a sideTen minutes, then slower -- The ten minutes covers the initial browning on both sides, after which the recipe moves them to a cooler part of the stove to finish; thicker muffins will take longer. A finished muffin sounds hollow when tapped and reads about 200F inside.
- Dusting the boardSemolina or coarse cornmeal on the work surface and the tops keeps the rolled rounds from sticking and gives the pale, gritty crust associated with English muffins. Flour alone works but scorches sooner.
- Yield and servingTwelve large muffins. They are best split with a fork rather than cut, which preserves the torn interior, then toasted; the recipe's own suggestion of splitting and toasting on the griddle is the traditional treatment.
The muffin of this recipe is the English griddle bread, sold by the muffin men who walked London streets with covered trays into the nineteenth century, and quite distinct from the American quick-bread muffin baked in cups. It survives in cookbooks like this one as a yeast bread cooked on top of the stove rather than in the oven, a method that was useful in kitchens where oven heat was expensive or unpredictable. The use of lard, with butter offered only as an alternative, is characteristic of American home baking before the First World War, when lard was the cheaper and more available fat.