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Raised Muffins
1 cup scalded milk. 1 cup boiling water 2 tablespoons butter 1/4 cup sugar 3/4 teaspoon salt ¼ yeast cake 1 egg 4 cups flour Add butter, sugar, and salt to milk and water; when lukewarm, add yeast cake, and when dissolved, egg well beaten, and flour; beat thoroughly, cover, and let rise over night. In morning, fill buttered muffin rings two-thirds full; let rise until rings are full, and bake thirty minutes in hot oven.
An overnight sponge-style muffin from the yeast-bread chapter, not the quick-bread one. The text as transcribed has two gaps worth resolving before you start.
- The missing milkThe ingredient list gives only boiling water, but the method says "add butter, sugar, and salt to milk and water." Fannie Farmer's raised muffins are built on roughly a cup of scalded milk plus a cup of boiling water; the milk line has dropped out of this transcription. Four cups of flour want about two cups of total liquid.
- "14 yeast cake"This is 1/4 yeast cake, a typesetting casualty. Compressed cakes of the period were commonly around 0.6 oz, though sizes varied, so a quarter cake is on the order of 1/2 teaspoon of modern active dry or instant yeast — a deliberately small amount, because the dough has all night to work.
- Lukewarm means lukewarmThe hinge of the recipe. Let the boiling water and scalded milk cool to about 100-110F before the yeast goes in; much hotter and the yeast is damaged or killed and the dough will barely move overnight. The butter melting into the hot liquid helps bring the temperature down.
- Overnight riseAt a warm modern room temperature the dough may over-ferment and collapse in eight hours. A cool room, around 65F, gives the slow rise the recipe assumes; the refrigerator works too, but let the dough come back to room temperature before filling the tins.
- Muffin ringsThese were bottomless metal rings set on a greased baking sheet or griddle, essentially crumpet rings. A standard buttered 12-cup muffin tin does the same job; the sides will be smoother and the tops more domed.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; a hot oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 400-425F. Thirty minutes at that heat is long for a muffin-sized item in a modern oven — start checking at twenty. They are done at about 190-200F internal, or when they sound hollow tapped on the bottom.
- YieldNo yield is given; four cups of flour with this much liquid will more than fill a standard twelve-cup tin. Best eaten the day they are baked; the crumb is bread-like and stales quickly.
Raised muffins belong to an older tradition than the baking-powder muffins that fill out the muffin recipes — they are essentially a soft enriched bread dough baked in rings, first cousin to the English muffin and the crumpet, and they appear in American cookbooks well before chemical leavens were reliable. Fannie Farmer's 1896 book appeared at a time when compressed yeast cakes, sold fresh, had made overnight sponges more predictable, and when baking powder was making them optional. The recipe assumes a household that starts bread at night as a matter of course, and a cook who knows what lukewarm feels like on the wrist — Farmer's famous insistence on level measurements did not extend to temperature, which she gave only as "hot," "moderate" and the like.