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English Crumpets
One quart warm milk, one teaspoon salt, half cup yeast, flour enough for a not very stiff batter. When light add half a cup melted butter, let stand twenty minutes, and bake in muffin rings or cups.
Mrs. G. W. M.
A wet yeast batter of the old barm-raised type, written for a cook who kept her own yeast and a griddle. The essentials survive translation; the leavening and the vessel need explaining.
- Half a cup of yeastThis means liquid yeast — homemade barm, hop yeast or a saved potato ferment, mostly water by volume. One packet of active dry yeast (2¼ tsp) softened in a little of the warm milk does the same work for a quart of liquid, though the flavour will be cleaner and less sour.
- Warm milkWarm to about 100–110F, no hotter; pasteurised milk needs only warming.
Crumpets belong to the British griddle-cake family — alongside pikelets and muffins — all of them yeast batters cooked on a hot iron plate rather than in an oven, which is how households without a reliable oven produced bread-like food. The name is generally traced to a Welsh or Middle English word for a thin curled cake; the modern pitted, spongy crumpet baked in a ring is a nineteenth-century form. Its appearance in an American compilation, credited to a contributor's initials, shows how these community books gathered English tea-table dishes alongside regional Southern cooking.