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Muffins (II)
Mrs. J. D. Odel.
One quart of milk, four eggs, one tablespoon sugar, two tablespoons of butter, one teaspoon salt, two teaspoons Cook's Friend baking powder, two tablespoons yeast; flour to make a stiff batter; bake in rings when light.
This is a yeast-raised griddle muffin, not a cake-style muffin in a tin. The rings are the whole point: batter poured into metal rings on a hot griddle, giving something close to what we now call an English muffin.
- The hinge: bake in rings, on a griddleThe hinge: bake in rings -- "Bake in rings" most likely means greased metal muffin or crumpet rings set on a lightly greased griddle or heavy skillet over moderate heat rather than in a hot oven; the recipe gives no temperature. Fill each ring about half full, cook until set and browned beneath, then lift the ring and turn to brown the second side.
- "When light"That is the only doneness cue for the rise: the batter should be visibly puffed and bubbled. With yeast of this kind that may take a couple of hours or considerably longer, even overnight. Do not let it collapse.
- Two tablespoons yeastThis means soft or liquid yeast of the period, either homemade or a wet baker's compressed yeast, and it does not convert cleanly. Modern equivalent is about one packet of active dry yeast, but treat the original quantity as genuinely ambiguous.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA baking powder brand sold in Canada in this period. Any modern double-acting baking powder does the job; note that the recipe lists it with the other ingredients rather than adding it after the rise.
- Flour to make a stiff batterWith a quart of milk and four eggs you are looking at roughly 7 to 8 cups of flour, but work by feel: the batter should be thick enough to hold a shape yet still pourable, closer to a very soft dough than a pancake batter.
- Scale and yieldA quart of milk is a large batch, on the order of two dozen muffins. Halve everything for a household of two or three; the batter does not keep well once the baking powder is in.
- Butter and sugarTwo tablespoons of butter and one of sugar in a quart of milk is barely sweet by design; these are not a sweet cake.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is generally credited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook of its kind. That format explains the shape of this entry: a contributor's name, a bare list of quantities, and the assumption that the reader already knows what a muffin ring is and how her own griddle behaves. Two leavens in one batter, yeast for flavour and slow rise plus a chemical powder for insurance, was common in the transitional decades after baking powder became cheap and reliable; the usual explanation offered is that cooks trusted the new product but were not yet willing to abandon the old. The brand name in the ingredient list is itself a period marker, of the era when a recipe would specify a proprietary powder much as it might specify a particular flour.