Muffins
1½ teaspoonfuls salt 1½ yeast cake 1 egg 4 cupfuls flour Add Crisco, salt, and half of sugar to milk and water; when lukewarm add yeast mixed with remaining sugar, egg well beaten, and flour. Breads, etc.
Beat thoroughly, cover, and let rise until light. Put greased muffin rings on hot griddle greased with Crisco. Fill half full with raised muffin mixture and cook slowly until well risen and browned underneath . Turn muffins and rings and brown other side. When muffins are cold, split open, toast, and serve with marmalade.
Sufficient for sixteen muffins.
This is a raised griddle muffin — an English muffin — not a cup-cake muffin, and the printed ingredient list here is incomplete. Read the method before you shop.
- The list is truncatedThe method calls for Crisco, sugar, milk and water, but only salt, yeast, egg and flour carry quantities on this page. Any amounts for the fat, sugar and liquid would be invention; the original does not say.
- Yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes were commonly around 0.6 oz, though sizes varied. On the usual equivalence of one cake to one packet of dry yeast, one and a half cakes is roughly 1½ packets (about 3⅜ teaspoons) of modern active dry or instant yeast — a generous dose.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 and the reason this book exists. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter changes the flavour and browns faster on the griddle.
- Muffin ringsMetal rings roughly 3 to 4 inches across and about an inch deep. A clean tin can with both ends removed is a common improvised substitute. Grease the rings as well as the griddle, as the recipe directs, or the risen dough will cling and tear.
- "Cook slowly" means itThis is the hinge, though the original gives no temperature or timing. Keep the griddle moderate, low enough that the centre cooks before the crust darkens; anything hotter leaves a gummy middle under a handsome exterior.
- Let rise until lightPerhaps an hour in a warm kitchen, though the original sets no time: go by the dough being puffed and full of bubbles. "Fill half full" implies it should be soft enough to spoon into the rings, not stiff enough to shape by hand.
- Split, don't cutThe instruction to split open before toasting is what produces the craggy interior. Pull them apart with a fork or your fingers around the equator; a knife smooths the crumb and the toast is duller for it.
- YieldSufficient for sixteen. The muffins are left to go cold before being split and toasted, which implies a bread made ahead rather than eaten straight off the griddle.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble two years after the launch of the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening it is named for, and the book's job was to show cooks that the new fat could do everything butter and lard did. Griddle muffins of this kind were an old English form — raised with yeast, cooked on a hot plate rather than in an oven, and traditionally split and toasted rather than sliced. The instruction to serve them cold, toasted and spread with marmalade is a fair picture of an Edwardian-era breakfast table on either side of the Atlantic.