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Crumpets
Place a pint of milk in saucepan on fire, and as soon as it comes to a boiling point set it to cool. Add a teaspoon salt and gradually dredge in a pound sifted flour, sharply stirring while adding it with spatula. Then add half ounce compressed yeast, beat continuously for ten minutes, set in warm place to raise for one hour and thirty minutes, pour in three tablespoons melted butter and briskly beat again. Roll out paste on a lightly floured table in twelve equal round cake forms. Arrange them on a lightly buttered pastry tin, lightly butter surface of each, set in moderate oven for thirty minutes or until a nice golden colour, remove, dress on a dish with folded napkin and serve.
A baked, yeast-raised tea cake rather than the holed griddle crumpet most readers will picture. The instructions assume a cook who knows what dough should feel like, and one step in particular is easy to get wrong.
- Cool the milk properlyThe milk is scalded and set aside to cool before the yeast goes in. Aim for lukewarm, around 105F/40C; much above 120F/50C starts to damage yeast and around 140F/60C will kill it outright, and the dough will not rise.
- Compressed yeastHalf an ounce of compressed (fresh cake) yeast is about 14 g. If substituting, use roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons instant dry yeast or 2 teaspoons active dry.
- A pint of milkAn American pint is 2 cups; in a British edition it would be 20 fl oz. Either way, a pint of liquid to a pound of flour gives a slack, spoonable batter, not something you can roll.
- "Roll out paste" is optimisticAt this hydration the mixture will not roll. Treat it as a thick batter and either drop it into greased rings or muffin cups, or hold back some of the milk to bring it to a soft dough you can pat out and cut.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. Thirty minutes is right for cakes of this size baked as rounds; check at twenty if you have divided the mixture into a shallow tin.
- The second riseAfter the butter is beaten in and the cakes are shaped, they want a short proof on the tin before baking, though the text does not say so. Twenty to thirty minutes in a warm spot will give a lighter crumb.
- Yield and servingTwelve cakes. Service on a dish with a folded napkin is a standard presentation of the period and helps hold the heat; they are best eaten hot.
The word crumpet has covered a wide range of small tea breads over the centuries, and the sense familiar today -- a yeasted batter cooked in rings on a griddle until the top is pitted with holes -- appears to have settled during the nineteenth century. Older and regional usage was looser, and the word has been applied to pancakes and to soft baked cakes as well as to thin batters cooked on a bakestone. This version is baked rather than griddled, and the result is closer to a soft breakfast roll than to a griddle crumpet.