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Sweet Crumpets
Heat a pint milk in a saucepan, adding half ounce concentrated yeast and a saltspoon salt. Mix well until the yeast is thoroughly dissolved; then add four ounces sifted flour and thoroughly stir till well thickened. Place the pan in a warm place to raise for thirty minutes. Add three tablespoons melted butter and stir well with a wooden spoon. Heat in a large, lightly buttered frying pan, pour the preparation into the pan and let cook for five minutes on the fire; turn it over, then set in the oven to bake for ten minutes. Remove, cut into six equal pieces and serve.
This is a very loose yeast batter cooked as one large cake rather than in crumpet rings, and it needs a few corrections in handling before it will behave.
- Do not heat the milk hot"Heat a pint milk" must mean warm to about 100-110F. Milk much above 130F will begin to kill the yeast, and the batter will never rise.
- Concentrated yeastIf this means the compressed fresh yeast of the period, half an ounce is roughly one and a half to two teaspoons of active dry yeast, or about a teaspoon and a half of instant. Fresh cake yeast, where you can still find it, can be used weight for weight.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That is very little salt for a pint of milk; a half teaspoon suits modern palates.
- The flour is not a misprintFour ounces of flour to a pint of milk gives a thin, pourable batter, closer to a crepe or batter pudding than to a stiff crumpet mix. Expect it to spread across the whole pan.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, will set the interior in the ten minutes specified without drying the surface.
- Use an ovenproof panThe cake goes from stovetop to oven, so cook it in cast iron or another skillet with no plastic handle. Butter the pan lightly, as instructed, and keep the heat moderate or the underside colors before the middle sets.
- Turning itA batter this slack is fragile at the five-minute mark. Slide it onto a plate and invert the pan over it, or run it under a broiler briefly to set the top rather than flipping.
- Yield and servingSix wedges from one large pan cake, enough for three or four at breakfast. Serve hot with butter and honey or jam; it will not have the open holed crumb of a true crumpet.
Filippini's International Cook Book gathers dishes from hotel and restaurant kitchens, and "sweet crumpets" here is a continental cook's reading of a British teatime item rather than the thing itself. A proper crumpet is a thick yeast batter poured into metal rings on a griddle, where trapped gas and often a little added soda open the characteristic holes; what this recipe produces is a single soft yeast-raised pancake, finished in the oven, then divided. The origin of the name is uncertain; it is often linked to a family of words for a thin cake, and the Welsh crempog is frequently cited, though the connection is traditional rather than established. By the late nineteenth century "crumpet" and "muffin" were used loosely enough in print that a professional chef writing for an American audience could apply either to almost any raised griddle batter. The reliance on concentrated yeast, sold by the half ounce and dissolved directly into warm liquid, is characteristic of the period.