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Muffins (Beat four eggs into a full)
Beat four eggs into a full tablespoon of lard mix into them one and one-half pints sour milk, effervescing with a teaspoon of soda; add enough flour to make the consistency of pound cake. Bake in heated rings.
A griddle muffin, not a cupcake-shaped one: the batter is dropped into greased metal rings set on a hot griddle and turned once, in the manner of what we now call English muffins. Everything else follows from that.
- The hinge: heat the rings firstThe recipe's one explicit instruction is that the rings be heated before the batter goes in; greasing them as well will stop the muffins sticking. If cooking them on a griddle in the usual manner for muffin rings, work at a steady medium heat and turn each muffin once when the top has set and the underside is browned. No temperature is given in the original.
- Measurements in modern termsOne and a half pints of sour milk is 3 cups; a full tablespoon of lard is a generous, slightly heaped tablespoon, say 15 g or a little more. The recipe gives no flour quantity, so mix by feel.
- "Consistency of pound cake"A thick batter that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pouring, roughly 4 to 5 cups of flour here. It should mound slightly in the ring and settle, not spread.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which today's pasteurised milk will not reliably reproduce. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute, cup for cup.
- SodaOne teaspoon of soda to 3 cups of buttermilk is on the modest side by current practice, which would use closer to a teaspoon and a half. Whisk it into the milk as the original directs and get the batter onto the griddle promptly, since the lift begins the moment acid meets alkali.
- LardMelt it before beating in the eggs, or it will stay in lumps. Butter or a neutral oil works in its place.
- If you have no muffin ringsEgg rings or open tuna tins with the ends removed serve the same purpose. Baked instead in greased muffin tins at 400F for 18 to 20 minutes, the batter gives a good, if different, cakier muffin.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 muffins of roughly three inches, depending on ring size. The batter does not hold; cook it all at once.
Muffins of this kind are generally associated with the age of the griddle rather than the oven: the recipe says only "bake in heated rings," a method often linked to the flat, split-and-toast muffin still sold as an English muffin. The Home Cook Book is a compiled charity cookbook, the recipes gathered from contributors and printed largely as they were sent in, which accounts for the telegraphic style and the missing flour quantity here. The pairing of sour milk with soda is the signature leavening of the mid-nineteenth-century North American kitchen, cheap and immediate, standing in for the yeast sponge that an older muffin would have required and for the commercial baking powders that were only then becoming common in household use.