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English Muffins
at breakfast time pull some of it quite thin with the fingers and cut into pieces two or three inches long; drop the pieces into boiling lard and fry the same as doughnuts; serve as biscuit, or in a vegetable dish dressed with hot cream, and salt, or serve with maple syrup.
This is the tail end of a longer entry: the yeast dough itself is made the night before in the preceding lines, and what survives here is only the morning instruction for frying the surplus. Treat it as a method for using risen bread dough rather than a standalone recipe.
- The missing halfThe preceding lines (not on this page) supply the dough: a soft yeast dough set the night before, of the sort period books call English muffins, usually baked in the morning on a griddle, often in rings. Any batch of raised white bread or muffin dough, given its second rise, should behave much the same way here.
- Boiling lard"Boiling" fat in period usage means fat hot enough to bubble around the dough, not fat at a boil. For doughnuts the working range is 365–375F; below that the dough drinks fat, above it the outside colors before the middle sets.
- Pulling, not rollingStretching the dough thin with the fingers rather than rolling it disturbs the risen crumb less, so the pieces are more likely to puff. Rolling presses out gas and tends to give a denser result.
- Two or three inches longCut them small. Thin strips of that size cook through in roughly a minute a side; thicker pieces need longer, and risk coloring outside before the middle sets.
- "Serve as biscuit"That means serve them in place of a bread at the meal, alongside the savory dishes — not as a sweet. The maple syrup option is the alternative treatment.
- A vegetable dishAn open serving bowl of the kind vegetables were sent to table in. The fried pieces are heaped in it and hot cream poured over, so they soften slightly, like fried bread in gravy.
- Yield and timingThe recipe says only to pull off 'some' of the dough, so the quantity is at the cook's discretion. Fry in small batches so the fat temperature holds, and drain on paper before dressing them.
In American cookbooks of the Butterick era, "English muffins" meant a soft yeast dough set overnight, baked in the morning on a griddle, commonly inside metal rings — the split-and-toast muffin rather than the cupcake-shaped kind (the latter, raised in gem pans, was already familiar in American kitchens by this date). What this fragment records is a use for surplus dough: it is pulled thin and dropped into hot fat, giving a quick fried bread for the same breakfast. Frying yeast dough has cousins wherever dough and a fat kettle met, from Pennsylvania German fried dough cakes to New Orleans beignets, and the choice offered here between hot cream with salt or maple syrup shows the savory-sweet line at breakfast was not fixed.