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Muffins (III)
Mrs. Spence.
One quart of flour; mix five tablespoonsful of Cook's Friend in the flour, a piece of butter the size of two eggs, five teaspoons of sugar, and as much milk as will make a stiff batter. Bake twenty minutes in rings.
A plain quick-bread muffin baked in rings rather than a modern muffin tin. The proportions are given by volume and by comparison, so a little translation is needed before you start.
- Cook's FriendA Canadian brand of baking powder (McLaren's Cook's Friend), used here simply as a synonym for baking powder. Five tablespoons is far more than modern practice; modern double-acting powder is considerably stronger, and about 4 teaspoons for a quart of flour will do the work without a soapy, metallic aftertaste.
- A quart of flourMeasured by volume, about 4 cups, or 480-500 g depending on how it is scooped. This is a large batch, roughly 12 to 16 muffins.
- Butter the size of two eggsBy the usual nineteenth-century reckoning of about 2 oz of butter to an egg, roughly 1/2 cup, or 110-115 g. Nineteenth-century books used the egg as a volume gauge constantly, but the gauge was approximate and varied from book to book.
- "Rings"Metal muffin or crumpet rings, set on a greased baking sheet or a griddle. A standard muffin tin works, filled two-thirds full; expect the tops to dome less than a modern muffin because there is no egg to set the crumb.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book leaves it to the cook's judgement. As a modern working equivalent, a baking-powder batter of this size baked twenty minutes wants a fairly hot oven, around 400-425F.
- "As much milk as will make a stiff batter"Start with about 1 1/2 cups and add cautiously. The batter should drop heavily from a spoon rather than pour, and it should be mixed only until the flour disappears.
- Bake at onceThere is no chemical delay built into this dough. Once the milk meets the powder the rise begins, so have the rings greased and the oven hot before mixing.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) is generally credited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook, compiled "by ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns" in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and its recipes carry contributors' names as this one does -- Mrs. Spence's muffins sat beside other versions of the same dish, which the book distinguishes by numbering them I, II, III. The reliance on Cook's Friend baking powder is a period marker in itself: chemical leavening appears to have become widely available in Canadian shops only in the preceding decades, and brand names seem to have passed readily into ordinary usage, so that a contributor could write "Cook's Friend" and assume every reader knew she meant baking powder. Muffins baked in rings rather than tins also point back to the older griddle tradition, where a ring simply held a soft batter in shape while it set.