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Twin Mountain Muffins
1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup sugar ½ teaspoon salt 1 egg 1 cup milk 2 cups bread flour 5 teaspoons baking powder Cream the butter; add sugar and egg well beaten; sift baking powder with flour, and add to the first mixture, alternating with milk. Bake in buttered tin gem pans twentyfive minutes. One Egg Muffins I 3½ cups flour 1⅓ cups milk 6 teaspoons baking powder 3 tablespoons melted butter 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg 3 tablespoons sugar Mix and sift dry ingredients; add gradually milk, egg well beaten, and melted butter. Bake in buttered gem pans twenty-five minutes. If iron pans are used they must be previously heated. This recipe makes thirty muffins. Use half the proportions given and a small egg, if half the number is required. 2 cups flour ½ teaspoon salt
A plain creamed-butter muffin from the era when "gem pans" meant heavy cast-iron muffin tins. The method and proportions translate directly; the omissions are oven temperature and yield.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no oven heat for this muffin. A hot oven of about 400F is the usual modern equivalent; check at twenty minutes, as twenty-five minutes will only suit cups filled two-thirds full.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan; sizes and cup shapes varied. A modern 12-cup muffin tin works; the book's neighbouring muffin recipe notes that iron pans should be heated beforehand, and greasing a heated iron pan helps the outsides set at once.
- Bread flourPeriod 'bread flour' meant hard spring-wheat flour; how it compares in strength to today's bread flour is not settled. All-purpose will give a tender crumb here; mix only until the dry streaks vanish.
- The salt figureOne and a half teaspoons of salt is far more than this quantity of batter wants. A quarter teaspoon is in keeping with the sugar and butter here; treat the larger number with suspicion.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons to two cups of flour is generous; the neighbouring recipe on this page works out nearer to one and three-quarter teaspoons per cup. With modern double-acting powder, three to four teaspoons here will lift the batter without a metallic aftertaste.
- Alternating additionsAdd flour and milk in three and two parts, beginning and ending with flour. This keeps the creamed butter from breaking and holds the batter thick enough that the muffins dome rather than spread.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 standard muffins. They are at their best within an hour of baking; the crumb stales quickly because the fat is modest.
Twin Mountain Muffins share their name with the Twin Mountain House, a large White Mountains resort hotel in northern New Hampshire that drew Boston summer visitors in the late nineteenth century, though no documented link between the hotel's kitchen and the recipe has been established. Named hotel and resort dishes were common currency in the cooking-school books of the period. The muffin itself belongs to the age of chemical leaven, which made it possible to serve fresh hot bread at breakfast without a yeast sponge set the night before, and books like this one give considerable space to the quick breads that resulted.