Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Toasted Muffins
Toasted Muffins
Take a quantity of muffins, pull open the side (never cut them), and toast them before a clear fire. When done, pull them apart, when both halves should be of an equal thickness. Put a little butter on each piece, close them together again, place them on a hot plate with a cover, cut them into quarters, and serve very hot.
This is an English muffin, not the American quick-bread muffin, and nearly every instruction here exists to protect its interior crumb.
- Which muffinAn 1890s "muffin" is a yeast-raised griddle bread with an open, uneven crumb — what a supermarket now sells as an English muffin. It is not a cupcake-shaped baked muffin, which cannot be split or toasted this way.
- Pull, never cutThis is the hinge of the recipe. Tearing the muffin open along its seam leaves a ragged surface of torn air pockets that catch butter and crisp unevenly; a knife shears them flat and gives you a smooth, leathery face. A fork run around the equator does the job if your hands are not up to it.
- Open the side, then toast wholeThe muffin is split part-way, toasted while still hinged together, and only pulled fully apart afterward, which is the order the text gives.
- A clear fireMeaning a coal fire burned down past smoke and flame to steady radiant heat — the Victorian equivalent of a broiler. Use a broiler element or toaster oven about 4 inches from the heat, roughly 2 to 3 minutes a side, rather than a slot toaster, which crushes a hinged muffin.
- Equal thicknessThe text's remark that both halves should be of an equal thickness indicates the tear was meant to run evenly down the middle rather than off-centre; adjust the tear as you go if it starts to run shallow.
- Butter and reassembleButter goes on hot so it soaks into the torn crumb, then the halves are closed and only quartered afterwards, in the order the recipe sets out.
- Covered hot plateA warmed plate under a cover holds the muffin at temperature between kitchen and table. A brief hold in a 200F oven does the same; do not hold long or the crisped faces soften.
- YieldThe original gives none. Figure one muffin per person at tea or breakfast, two if it is the main item on the plate.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working practice of the Waldorf's kitchens around 1896, and a note this short — with no quantities at all — is a reminder that much of what a hotel cook needed was technique rather than formula. The muffin itself is an English griddle bread, sold in London streets through the nineteenth century by muffin men who carried them under a cloth on a tray and rang a bell. The insistence on pulling rather than cutting is old, and Oscar's version is essentially a rule of service: the muffin is opened, toasted, buttered, reassembled, quartered and covered, so that it arrives at the table hot and whole-looking rather than as two dry halves.