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White Mountain Muffins
1 egg 1 2/3 cups sugar tablespoonful butter 2/3 cup sweet milk 2 cups Northern flour 11/½ teaspoonful baking powder Beat eggs and add to sugar, also melted butter; sift flour and baking powder and add alternately with milk. Bake in quick oven.
A plain creamed muffin batter, printed with two numbers that the typesetter or the scanner mangled. Read those carefully before you start.
- The sugar is almost certainly wrongThe sugar looks wrong -- "1 2/3 cups sugar" against 2 cups flour would give a candy-sweet batter that spreads and burns. The figure may be a misreading of the 2/3 cup that also appears for the milk directly above it, with the leading 1 a stray digit. Treat the quantity as genuinely uncertain; 2/3 cup is the safer reading.
- "11/½ teaspoonful baking powder"This is a garbled 1 1/2 teaspoons. That is the right proportion for 2 cups of flour in a batter with no acid ingredient.
- Northern flourHard spring wheat flour from the northern plains, sold as distinct from softer Southern winter wheat. Modern all-purpose flour is the equivalent; bread flour will make the muffins chewier than intended.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk used with saleratus. Whole milk is closest.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 450F; the recipe gives no figure. Muffins want the high initial heat to set the crust while the baking powder is still lifting; check from about 15 minutes in a standard tin.
- One tablespoon of butter is not a typoOne tablespoon of butter reads as lean rather than as an error -- this is a spare batter by modern standards. Melt the butter and add it while it is warm but not hot; if the egg and sugar are cold the fat will set into flecks.
- Alternating flour and milkThe direction matters more than it looks. Add the dry and wet in alternating batches, mixing only until the flour disappears each time; overworking after the milk goes in produces tunnels and a tough crumb.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 standard muffins, or 8 in a large tin. Grease the cups well, since there is little fat in the batter itself.
The name attached itself to a great many things in nineteenth-century American cookery, most famously White Mountain cake and the boiled White Mountain frosting, and it generally meant nothing more specific than very white and light; the connection to the New Hampshire peaks is the traditional explanation rather than a documented one. The insistence on "Northern flour" is the telling detail here: before commodity flour was standardized and nationally branded, cooks distinguished hard northern spring wheat from soft southern winter wheat by name, and a recipe that named the type was telling you it depended on that flour's strength.