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Crumpets
Put two ounces of flour in a basin; dissolve one ounce of German yeast in one quart of warm milk, add one teaspoonful of salt, and when the yeast is dissolved, mix the flour with the milk; when it is quite smooth, throw a cloth over the pan and let the batter rise in a warm place, this will take about three-quarters of an hour. Place in the oven, until quite hot, a stone slab which should be about one inch thick and the size of an ordinary baking-sheet; when the slab is hot, oil it with butter, put some tin hoops also oiled in rows onto it; take out carefully large spoonfuls of the batter and put one in each hoop; shut the oven quickly and bake the crumpets in a sharp heat. When they are done on one side, remove the hoops and turn the crumpets over that they may bake on the other side.
Oscar's crumpets are baked on a preheated stone rather than cooked on a griddle, which is unusual but workable in a home oven. One quantity in the original almost certainly went wrong in typesetting, so read the first point before you start.
- The flour quantity is wrongTwo ounces of flour to a quart of milk gives liquid, not batter, and nothing will rise or hold in a hoop. Crumpet batter of this type runs closer to 2 pounds of flour per quart of milk; the original figure appears to be a misprint for pounds, but the book gives no way to confirm it. Work from a proportion you trust rather than the printed one.
- German yeastThis is fresh compressed baker's yeast, sold in cakes. One ounce is roughly equivalent to 3 to 4 teaspoons of instant dry yeast for the same volume of liquid.
- Warm milkWarm means blood temperature, around 100F. Milk that feels hot to the hand risks damaging the yeast, and the recipe leaves no second rise to recover from that.
- A sharp heat'Sharp' was period shorthand for a hot oven; the book gives no temperatures, but somewhere in the region of 425 to 450F is the usual modern equivalent. The stone slab needs a good half hour in there to hold that heat once cold batter hits it.
- The stone slab and hoopsA baking stone or steel does the job, and modern crumpet rings or English muffin rings replace the tin hoops. Oil both the stone and the inside of every ring; batter this slack welds itself to bare metal.
- Rising timeThree-quarters of an hour in a warm place is right for fresh yeast, but judge by the batter rather than the clock. It should be domed, bubbly and loose enough to fall from the spoon in a sheet.
- Turning themLift the rings with tongs once the top has set and lost its shine, then flip. The second side needs only a minute or two; crumpets are meant to be pale, not browned like a muffin.
- Yield and servingWith the corrected flour, a quart of milk makes a large batch; the exact count depends on the size of the rings and how thickly they are filled. Crumpets are usually toasted before eating rather than served straight from the oven.
Crumpets are an English griddle bread, and the name is generally traced to older words for a thin curled cake; by the nineteenth century the batter had become a wet, yeast-raised one poured into metal hoops so it could set with its characteristic open crumb. Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf-Astoria book appeared in 1896, and the fashionable New York table of the period drew heavily on English and French service. The oven-and-stone-slab method here appears to be a professional kitchen's answer to a domestic griddle problem, letting a cook bake a number at once on a preheated surface the size of a baking sheet rather than turning them out a few at a time.