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Rye Muffins
Put three breakfast cupfuls of sifted rye-meal into a large bowl, and add an equal quantity of flour, one teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, two teaspoonfuls of cream of tartar, one-half teaspoonful of salt, and two tablespoonfuls of sugar, all rubbed together through a sieve. Beat thoroughly two eggs, mix in one breakfast cupful of milk, stir this into the dry mixture, and work it to a rather stiff paste. Dip a tablespoon in cold milk, fill it with the batter, drop it into boiling fat in a fryingpan, and fry for about ten minutes. Take out the muffins as they are done, drain them, place them on a napkin spread over a dish, and serve. They may also be made with one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of rye-meal and flour in equal quantities.
Despite the name, these are fried drop batter cakes rather than anything baked in a muffin tin. The proportions and the frying time both need attention before you start.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally taken as somewhere around 8 to 10 fluid ounces; treat it as a standard 8 oz cup and expect to adjust. The closing sentence's alternative -- "one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of rye-meal and flour in equal quantities" -- can be read either as 1 1/2 cupfuls of each or as 1 1/2 cupfuls in total; on the first reading it is the more sensible batch size for a household.
- Rye-mealThis is coarsely ground rye, closer to today's medium or dark rye flour than to the fine white rye sold for sandwich loaves. It absorbs liquid slowly, so the batter thickens noticeably as it stands.
- The liquid is shortOne cupful of milk against six cupfuls of dry ingredients will not make a batter you can drop from a spoon, even a "rather stiff paste." Scale the flour down as the closing sentence suggests, or add milk until a spoonful releases cleanly; rye batter should mound but slump.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is baking powder made from scratch: the 1 teaspoon soda plus 2 teaspoons cream of tartar is roughly equivalent to 3 to 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. Sifting the leavening with the dry ingredients, as directed, is what keeps it from streaking; the reaction begins the moment the milk goes in, so fry promptly.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means fat at frying heat; the recipe gives no figure, so judge it by a scrap of batter browning briskly (very roughly 350 to 375F). A frying pan gives shallow fat, so the cakes will need turning once the underside sets.
- Ten minutes is too longA tablespoon of batter in properly hot fat is cooked through in about 3 to 5 minutes. Ten minutes gives a dark, hard crust; and if the fat is cool enough to justify ten minutes, the batter will soak it up.
- The spoon trickDipping the spoon in cold milk between drops is the working detail here. Stiff rye batter clings to dry metal, and a wetted spoon releases each portion in one piece.
- Yield and servingDrain well, and serve hot on the napkin over a dish, as directed.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation into print in 1896, filled his book with plain American household cooking alongside the hotel dishes people bought it for. Rye belongs to the plain side: it was a staple grain in the Northeast long before wheat flour became cheap and universal, surviving in combinations like the old "rye and Injun" bread of rye meal and cornmeal. By the 1890s rye had largely retreated to specialty breads, and its appearance here in a fried breakfast cake is a holdover from an older domestic repertoire. The word "muffin" in nineteenth-century American books was elastic, covering griddle cakes, ring-baked yeast breads and, as here, spoonfuls of batter dropped into hot fat; the modern sense of a cupcake-shaped quick bread had not yet crowded the others out.