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Wheat Muffins
Mix one pint milk, two eggs, three table-spoons yeast, and saltspoon of salt, with flour enough to make a stiff batter; let rise four of salt , with flour enough to make a stiff batter; let rise four or five hours and bake in muffin-rings in a hot oven, for about ten minutes.
This recipe may be made with Graham flour, by adding two tablespoons of molasses, and is excellent. - Mrs. G. W. Marchant.
A yeast-raised breakfast muffin from the era before chemical leavening took over the griddle. The batter is closer to a thick English-muffin dough than to a modern quick-bread muffin, and the timings assume a home yeast of unpredictable strength.
- The yeast is the hingeThree tablespoons of yeast means liquid yeast — homemade barm or the bottled brewer's yeast sold at the time — not granulated dry yeast. Substituting three tablespoons of modern yeast would be wildly out of proportion; a teaspoon or so of instant yeast supplies the same lift.
- Rising time follows from thatFour or five hours suits a sluggish nineteenth-century yeast. With commercial yeast the batter will be fully risen and beginning to fall well before then, so judge by volume and by the surface breaking into bubbles rather than by the clock.
- MeasuresA pint of milk is 2 cups. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon — light seasoning by modern taste for this much flour.
- "Flour enough"A stiff batter here means one that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours, roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups, but the original is genuinely open-ended and flour absorbency varies. Add gradually.
- A hot ovenRead that as roughly 400-450F. Muffin rings are shallow open bands set on a heated griddle or baking sheet; ten minutes is optimistic for anything deeper than about an inch, so expect 12 to 18 minutes and look for set sides and a browned top.
- If you have no ringsEgg rings or straight-sided tuna tins with the ends removed do the same job. Grease them and the sheet, and fill no more than two-thirds.
- The Graham variationGraham flour is coarse whole wheat, milled with the bran and germ. It absorbs more liquid and rises more slowly; the two tablespoons of molasses are there partly to feed the yeast and partly to mask the bitterness of the bran.
- YieldAbout a dozen muffins from a pint of milk. They are meant to be split and buttered hot.
Before baking powder became cheap and reliable, a muffin of this kind was a familiar thing in American and English cookbooks: a slack yeast batter, risen for hours and baked in metal rings on a griddle or hearth, giving the flat, split-and-toast bread we now call an English muffin. The Dixie Cook Book, one of the large compiled household books of the 1880s, gathered such recipes over the signatures of the women who sent them in, which is why Mrs. G. W. Marchant's name sits at the foot of it — attribution served as a warranty of the recipe, and as a small piece of social currency for the contributor. The Graham variation nods to Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer whose advocacy of unsifted whole-wheat flour left his name on the meal, and by this date on a great many cracker and muffin recipes offered as the wholesome alternative to white flour.