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Muffins, Mrs. Haldeman
Have in a vessel a pound sifted yellow cornmeal flour and four ounces sifted wheat flour, pour over a pint and a light gill boiling milk and briskly stir with wooden spatula until tepid. Beat up two fresh eggs in a bowl for two minutes, add one and a half gills lukewarm ferment, a teaspoon each salt and fine sugar, tablespoon good honey, light tablespoon melted fresh butter, and ten shelled, thoroughly scalded, peeled and finely pounded almonds, whisk well for three minutes, add to flour, and sharply mix the whole well together for twenty-five minutes with spatula. Have a pastry pan well greased with melted lard, butter well interiors of twelve muffin-ring moulds and lay moulds in pan. With a spoon fill them up to three-quarters of their height, cover with a paper and place them in temperature of 80 degrees for one and a half hours to rise. Remove paper and set in oven to bake for about thirty-five to forty minutes, or until a nice golden colour, remove, unmould, dress on hot dish enveloped in a napkin and serve with butter. Grease well a small square pan, place in it the remaining dough, well spread, cover and set to rise in temperature of 80 degrees for one and a half to two hours. Uncover and set to bake until of a nice light brown, or about one hour, turning pan around two or three times after twenty minutes of baking. Remove and serve for next occasion, cut up in any shaped slice desired.
TO ROAST COFFEE IN A SIMPLE WAY Have two-thirds of a pound best raw Java coffee mixed with one-third pound best quality Mocha. Butter a baking dish well with good butter all around interior, place coffee in plate and set in a moderate oven to roast until a good golden brown colour. (It will take about twenty-two minutes.) Be very careful frequently to mix in every direction with a wooden spoon meanwhile, place in an earthen jar and tightly cover, keep in a moderate temperature and use as required.
A yeast-raised cornmeal batter, closer to a soft dough than a modern quick-bread muffin mix, and it makes enough for twelve muffins plus a small pan loaf. The instructions assume a cook with liquid yeast on hand and muffin rings rather than a muffin tin.
- "Ferment"This means a liquid yeast — barm from brewing, or a home-kept sponge. A gill and a half is about 3/4 cup, but its strength is unknowable, so treat the quantity as approximate: a sponge made from about 2 teaspoons active dry yeast, 3/4 cup warm water and a spoonful of the wheat flour, left until foaming, stands in for it.
- Gills and pintsA gill is 1/2 cup; a "light gill" is a little under. The pint and a light gill of boiling milk comes to roughly 2 1/3 to 2 1/2 cups. A pound of cornmeal is about 3 cups, and four ounces of wheat flour a scant cup.
- Scalding the meal is the hingeBoiling milk poured over the cornmeal and stirred until tepid gelatinizes the starch. Skip it and the muffins are gritty and dry. Wait until the mixture is genuinely lukewarm before the yeast and eggs go in, or the yeast dies and the eggs curdle.
- Twenty-five minutes of beatingHand-beating with a spatula developed what little gluten the four ounces of wheat flour can offer and aerated a heavy batter. A stand mixer with the paddle on medium will cover much the same ground in a fraction of the time; the cornmeal itself has no gluten to develop.
- Muffin ringsThese are bottomless metal rings set on a greased pan, which is why the muffins are unmoulded rather than tipped out; they are filled only three-quarters high to leave room for the rise. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, buttered, though the sides will be less straight.
- Rising at 80 degreesFahrenheit, and a deliberately warm spot — the back of the stove or an airing cupboard. An oven with only the light on holds this reasonably. Ninety minutes is right for a batter this heavy; it will dome rather than double.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given for the muffins or the loaf. Thirty-five to forty minutes for muffins of this size suggests something in the moderate range, perhaps around 375°F, though that is inference rather than instruction. The pan loaf, at about an hour, wants the same heat; the direction to turn the pan is for an old range with hot spots and can be ignored in a modern oven.
- The almondsTen almonds, blanched and pounded to a paste, is a small amount and reads as a flavouring rather than a texture. Almond flour will not substitute cleanly — the point is the oil released by pounding.
- The coffee noteA "moderate oven" in period usage is usually reckoned somewhere around 350°F. Roasting green coffee in an oven at that sort of heat gives an uneven, underdeveloped roast by current standards; twenty-two minutes will get colour but not much sweetness. Freshly roasted beans also want a day or so to degas before they brew well, which the original does not mention.
Filippini's International Cook Book (first published 1906) is full of dishes carrying personal names, and this one belongs to the older American tradition of yeast-raised cornmeal breads that predates chemical leavening. The muffin ring is part of that picture: a bottomless collar of tin, used on a griddle or in a pan, which is how English muffins and their American cousins were shaped before pressed muffin tins became cheap household goods. The coffee instruction at the end is a period fixture rather than an afterthought. Coffee was sold green well into the nineteenth century and roasted at home in a skillet, a hand-cranked drum, or, as here, an oven; Java and Mocha were the familiar pairing, Java for body and Mocha for aroma. By 1911 pre-roasted packaged coffee was widely available, so the presence of this note may point to older household material behind the book.