Home › The World's Kitchen › English Muffins
English Muffins
Half pound sifted flour, half pint cold milk, one tablespoon baking powder, one saltspoon salt and two ounces butter.
Place the flour on the corner of the table. Make a fountain in the centre, pour the milk into the fountain, add the butter, powder and salt and thoroughly knead for five minutes. Divide the batter into six equal parts, roll them into ball forms, lightly flattening the tops as you would cakes. Arrange on a lightly buttered tin pan and bake in a slack oven for twenty minutes. Remove and serve.
Despite the name, this is not the yeast-raised, griddle-baked muffin split with a fork; it is a rich baking-powder dough baked in rounds, closer to a scone. Read it that way and it behaves.
- The weights in cupsHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups; half a pint of milk is 1 cup in American measure; two ounces of butter is half a stick. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- "Slack oven"A slack or cool oven is roughly 300-325F. At that heat these rounds will take longer than twenty minutes and will stay pale; 400F for 15-18 minutes gives the lift and colour a chemically leavened dough wants.
- That tablespoon of baking powderThree teaspoons to 1¾ cups of flour is noticeably more than the modern ratio of about a teaspoon per cup, and period baking powders may not have behaved like today's double-acting kind. Two teaspoons is closer to the intended rise without the metallic aftertaste.
- Do not knead five minutesThis is the hinge. Five minutes of kneading develops gluten and produces tough, bready rounds. Bring the dough together with as few strokes as it takes to stop it crumbling, under a minute, then shape.
- Cold butter, cold milkThe recipe has you pour the milk in first and add the butter after, which suits soft butter worked through the liquid. Rubbing cold butter into the flour before adding milk gives a flakier crumb, if that is what you are after.
- "Batter" is a doughThe text switches words mid-recipe. What you will have is a soft, slightly sticky dough that can be divided and rolled into balls by hand.
- Yield and servingSix rounds, best split and buttered within an hour of baking. They stale quickly, as quick breads tend to.
The International Cook Book came out of the Delmonico's kitchen tradition, and its author wrote for cooks who wanted a serviceable version of a dish from any national repertoire rather than an authentic one. That shows here: the true English muffin is a slack yeast dough proofed, cut in rings and cooked on a griddle or hot plate until it develops the open, holey crumb that toasts so well, a form associated with the English muffin-men who sold from trays and were still a familiar London sight in the nineteenth century. What is given instead is a French-method quick bread, complete with the fontaine in the flour, baked in the oven.