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Grilled Muffins
Put buttered muffin rings on a hot greased griddle. Fill one-half full with raised muffin mixture, and cook slowly until well risen and browned underneath; turn muffins and rings and brown the other side. This is a convenient way of cooking muffins when oven is not in condition for baking.
This is a method rather than a full formula — Farmer assumes you already have a bowl of raised (yeast-leavened) muffin batter from earlier in the bread chapter. What it produces is essentially an English muffin.
- What "raised muffin mixture" meansA soft yeast batter, wetter than a bread dough and slack enough to pour, left to rise until light. The recipe specifically calls for a raised (yeast-leavened) mixture rather than a baking-powder muffin batter.
- Muffin ringsStraight-sided metal rings about 3 to 3½ inches across and an inch deep. Egg rings, crumpet rings or well-scrubbed tuna tins with both ends removed all serve. Butter the inside walls, not just the base, or the risen batter will grip.
- Griddle heat"Cook slowly" is the hinge of the whole thing. On a modern burner that means low to medium-low. Too hot and you get a dark crust over a gummy middle; these need several minutes a side.
- Fill half fullTake that literally. The batter roughly doubles in the ring as it heats, and an overfilled ring spills and welds itself to the griddle.
- TurningTurn ring and muffin together with a wide spatula, supporting the top so the set surface does not tear.
- DonenessThe sides should look dry and matte rather than shiny, and an instant-read thermometer in the centre should show about 200F. Split them with a fork rather than a knife if you want the ragged interior that holds butter.
The instruction to griddle muffins "when oven is not in condition for baking" is a plain reminder of what a coal or wood range demanded: getting the firebox steady enough to bake bread took attention and fuel, while the griddle plate over the firebox was hot most of the day anyway. Yeast-raised muffins cooked in rings on a hot plate are the older form of the thing and, by an account often repeated, what Britain called muffins and America eventually rebranded as English muffins once the word "muffin" had been captured by the sweet, cakey, baking-powder sort that Fannie Farmer also gives in this chapter. The 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book sits right on that shift in vocabulary, and Farmer marks the yeast version in the title as "raised," so the distinction is carried in the name itself.