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English Common Muffins
Baked in rings on a huge griddle and carried around to customers, from the shops. Simply a common bread sponge of the cheapest, the muffins being pulled apart and toasted, almost invariably, before they are eaten. 2 pounds of flour. 1 quart of mixed water and yeast. 1 tablespoonful of salt. Mix the above together carefully, to have no lumps in it, at noon. The water should be warm and the sponge set to rise in a warm place. At about 3 beat the sponge thoroughly, and the longer the better, with spoon or paddle, and let rise again. Beat up again before using. Set tin rings the size of saucers on the griddle, half fill them with the batter, let bake light brown on the bottom, then turn them over and bake the other side. The batter should be thicker than for pancakes and thinner than fritters. The preceding being the cheapest made for sale, private parties make richer qualities with milk and a little shortening.
The Boston muffin man had a name for some kind of a hot breakfast and tea cake which the great word-catcher dictionaries have failed to rake in. The word was pyflit; his painted sign read "Muffins, Pyflits, Oatcakes, Goffers, Made Here by--." His place was a red brick, private house on Liquorpond street-of course everybody knows Liquorpond street, Boston-it leads into High street on the north and the Witham river runs at the back of the old brick stores on the further side of that, and the river itself is as lively as a street when the tide is up, although its channel to the sea is only maintained by means of bundles of wicker stuff, like the Mississippi jetties. The Muffin man used to start out punctual to the moment, morning and evening, and cry "muffins and pyflits"-and them only, so his literary customers must have known what "pyflits" meant. In that they had the advantage of these columns. In saying literary customers we only give honor where honor is due, for Boston has always been famous for literature and good hotels. The Roberts Brothers were located in Narrow Bargate, opposite the "Red Lion Inn" They used to issue a compendium with their almanac, and tried to please the Middlemarch people and "lay over" John Noble, the other bookseller, by leaving out the horse-doctoring matter and signs of Zodiac, and putting in fine pictures from the art union instead. These Roberts', striking into a new path right through the fences of old custom, were both young men. But of the hotels, the "Peacock" was the one patronized by the American travellers. (Hawthorne's England and Italy.) The "Red Lion" was frequented, principally, by "Cripps the Camer," and the "White Hart" by the farmers, and the "White Horse" by market people. Boston steeple, that most remarkable landmark, towers, an architectural glory, into the world of rooks, and crows, three hundred feet above these all. It can be seen thirty miles out at sea, and from Lincoln Minster, thirty miles the other way. But of course every Bostonian knows of the presence of this great tower, although he may never raise his eyes to look at it so common, nor care to remember old John Cot ton, the preacher. But the Boston muffin man with his mysterious pyflits, not to be found in the unabridged, was an object of more immediate interest. The people "off the Skelligs," and John Halifax, Gent, should know what pyflits are, but as for us we can only jump to the mild guess that they must have been crumpets under an ancient name.
This is a slack yeast batter rather than a kneaded dough, and it behaves like one: the whole character of the muffin comes from beating it hard and cooking it slowly. A few of the quantities reflect a bakeshop that kept liquid yeast on hand.
- The hinge: beat, don't kneadA batter this wet develops structure only through vigorous beating, and the text is right that longer is better — five to ten minutes with a stiff spoon, or a stand mixer with the paddle on medium. Under-beaten batter gives dense muffins with no open crumb to catch butter after splitting.
- "1 quart of mixed water and yeast"This is genuinely ambiguous. Commercial bakers of the period kept liquid barm or brewer's yeast and measured the two together, so the recipe gives no way to recover the actual yeast quantity. Modern practice would be a quart of warm water with a small amount of packaged yeast, but the original does not tell you how much.
- Flour and salt2 pounds of flour is roughly 7 cups of modern all-purpose, and the tablespoon of salt works out near 2 percent of the flour weight — at the upper end of ordinary bread practice, and appropriate for something eaten toasted with butter.
- Griddle heatLow to moderate, around 300–325F on a heavy pan or flat-top. These are thick and must set through before the outside colors, so expect 7–10 minutes a side. A hot griddle gives a browned shell over raw batter.
- The rings"The size of saucers" suggests roughly 4 to 5 inches across; the recipe says nothing about how deep they were. Crumpet or English muffin rings work; so do tuna cans with both ends removed. Grease the inside walls or the batter will grip as it rises.
- Batter consistencyThicker than pancake batter, thinner than fritter batter — it should fall from the spoon in a heavy ribbon rather than pour. Half-fill the rings only; the batter climbs considerably before it sets.
- Timing of the two risesThe noon-to-three schedule gives about three hours for the first rise in a warm room; the text sets no length for the second, only 'let rise again' and 'beat up again before using'. Judge by volume and surface bubbles, not the clock, since kitchens and yeast quantities differ.
- Yield and servingAbout 14 to 16 muffins four inches across. As the text says, they are meant to be pulled apart by hand rather than cut, then toasted; splitting with a knife smears the open crumb shut.
- The richer versionSubstituting milk for some or all of the water and working in a few tablespoons of butter or lard gives the softer, closer crumb of a household muffin. It browns faster, so drop the griddle heat slightly.
The joke buried in this entry is that the Boston in question is not Massachusetts but Boston in Lincolnshire, the English port that gave the American city its name: Liquorpond Street, Narrow Bargate, the Witham river, the White Hart, and above all the church tower known as the Boston Stump are all fixtures of the Lincolnshire town, and John Cotton preached at St Botolph's there before emigrating in 1633. The author's reference to Hawthorne points to the English notebooks and travel sketches, which record just this sort of provincial detail. The muffin man himself was a real trade — into the nineteenth century muffins and crumpets were bought hot from a hawker with a covered tray and a handbell rather than baked at home, which is why the recipe is written as a shop formula in bakers' proportions of flour by the pound. "Pyflit" is not recorded in the standard dictionaries, and the author's guess that it meant a crumpet under a local name is offered as a guess; regional griddle-cake names of this kind died with the sellers who cried them.