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One Egg Muffins II
4 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons melted butter 1 egg Mix and bake as One Egg Muffin I.
Berry Muffins I (without eggs) 2 cups flour 1/4 cup sugar 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoon butter 1 cup milk (scant) 1 cup berries 1/2 teaspoon salt Mix and sift dry ingredients; work in butter with tips of fingers; add milk and berries. ¼ cup butter 1/3 cup sugar 1 egg 2⅔ cups flour
A pair of quick muffin formulas from the era when the muffin ring on a griddle was giving way to the gem pan. The berry version is the one given here in full, and its method — cutting cold butter into the dry mix, then wetting it all at once — is closer to a scone than to a modern creamed muffin.
- OvenThe page gives no oven direction; One Egg Muffins II simply refers back to One Egg Muffin I. For muffins of this kind, 400–425F for twenty to twenty-five minutes in a greased 12-cup tin works; they are done when the tops are domed and springy.
- YieldTwo cups of flour with a cup of milk makes 12 standard muffins, or about 9 if you fill the cups generously.
- The hinge: stir as little as possibleAdd the milk and berries in one go and fold only until no dry flour shows. Beating this batter smooth develops gluten and gives you tunnels and a tough crumb.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour reads high, and with modern double-acting powder it is. Two and a half to three teaspoons will lift these adequately; the full four can leave a metallic edge.
- "Work in butter with tips of fingers"The butter here is cold and solid, rubbed into the flour as for pastry, not melted. Fingertips are traditionally said to be preferred as the coolest part of the hand; a pastry blender or a few pulses in a processor does the same job.
- BerriesA cup of blueberries, huckleberries or raspberries. Tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding keeps them from sinking; frozen berries should go in still frozen and unwashed.
- "1 cup milk (scant)"Scant means just short of the line — roughly 15 tablespoons. The dough should be thick and barely pourable, not a batter that runs.
Muffin recipes multiply in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book because the breakfast bread of a middle-class American household in the 1890s was expected to be hot, fresh and made that morning, and chemical leavening had made that possible without a yeast sponge set the night before. The numbered variants — One Egg Muffins I and II, Berry Muffins with and without eggs — follow the abbreviated cross-referencing of a teaching text, laying out a base formula and then its variations; eggs were seasonal and priced accordingly, and it may be that a version omitting them entirely earned its own entry for that reason, though the book does not say so. The berries would have been whatever the region supplied, and in New England that meant blueberries and huckleberries picked and used the same week.