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Muffins (Three pints of flour one quart)
Three pints of flour, one quart of milk, two eggs, four teaspoonfuls baking powder, one teaspoonful salt, one teateaspoonful butter, one lard melted together. Bake in quick oven.
A bare-bones baking-powder muffin from the era when a cook was expected to supply the missing detail. Two things need settling before you start: the garbled fat line and the fact that this is a pouring batter, not a spooned dough.
- The fat line is corrupt"One teateaspoonful butter, one lard melted together" has clearly lost a word or two in typesetting, since the lard is given no unit at all. A single teaspoon of fat for six cups of flour would be nominal, and a tablespoon of each is the likelier reading. Treat the amount as genuinely unknown and use your own judgement rather than the printed figure.
- UnitsThree pints of flour is about 6 cups, or roughly 1 lb 8 oz if measured sifted. One quart of milk is 4 cups. How period cooks filled a flour measure varied, so weight is the surer guide.
- A thin batter, by designFour cups of liquid to six cups of flour gives something closer to pancake batter than modern muffin dough. It is meant to be poured, and will bake lighter and more open than a modern spooned muffin.
- "Quick oven"Conventionally glossed as roughly 400-450F. The high heat sets the outside fast and helps the steam in that wet batter lift the interior.
- Leavening runs lightFour teaspoons of baking powder across 6 cups of flour is below the modern norm of about a teaspoon per cup, and the thin batter relies partly on steam.
- PansWith a batter this loose, gem pans, cast-iron popover cups, or iron muffin rings set on a griddle would all suit; the recipe does not say. Grease the pan and heat it before the batter goes in.
- Yield and timingExpect about 24 to 30 standard muffins, baked 20 to 25 minutes until deep brown and firm to the touch. Like popovers, they are best served hot from the pan.
Recipes like this one mark the point where the old yeast-raised English muffin, baked in rings on a griddle, gave way to the American chemically leavened muffin baked in an iron gem pan. Commercial baking powder became widely available in the second half of the nineteenth century, and where once a cook set a sponge overnight she could now raise a batter in minutes. The extreme brevity is characteristic of community and household cookbooks: the writer assumed her reader already owned a gem pan and needed only the proportions. The high proportion of milk to flour also links this muffin to the batter breads and popovers of the same shelf, all of which depend on steam as much as leavening.