Picture this: a gathering of black-bedecked New Yorkers after work, sipping drinks, talking in murmurs. We walk in, exhausted from testing recipes, laden with cake boxes. Heads turn. From behind minuscule glasses, someone asks, “What’d you bring?” We duck our heads—was this really the right thing to bring to a techno-urban wasteland of the terminally hip?—and say, “We made muffins.” Bingo. Everyone smiles. They grab the boxes, tear them open, laugh, enjoy themselves.
And not once, but over and over again this scenario played out as we were testing recipes. Why do muffins inspire such unbounded delight? Is it their taste? Their homeyness? Their simplicity? Whatever it is, it’s irresistible, even in Manhattan.
The story of muffins is something of a mystery. Nothing nefarious, of course, just murky. Most homespun treats (think here of brownies or gingerbread) have hard-to-discover origins; any lapse in their histories is prone to sheer guess.
Some food writers consider the “American” muffin to be the kissing cousin of the English muffin, that fork-separated, disk-like, yeast-raised bread popularized by Samuel B. Thomas, a Boston baker of British extraction. But here’s the rub, the one those descriptors should automatically have given away: “fork-separated,” “disk-like,” and “yeast-raised” are the very things an American muffin isn’t. We can safely say that the only thing English muffins and American muffins have in common is a name, muffin.
Many claim the word muffin is derived from muff, as in a little muff, or a small hand warmer. So people walked around clutching warm bread on winter days? Not likely. As Laura Mason points out in The Oxford Companion to Food, muffin is another culinary term borrowed from France, this time the archaic word moufflet, or soft, a reference to the irresistible texture of warm bread.
Admittedly, the first muffins baked in the New World were hardly irresistible. They were plain, even excessively so, varied only by the flour used: graham, wheat, rye, flax, or oat. But even such grim-faced, eat-your-prunes alterations indicated there was already variability in the recipes. As one deviation lead to another, it’s easy to see how we got to the stunning array of muffins available today—especially since muffins are so easy to make.
An enduring American passion for doing things fast also contributes to their popularity. Muffins are quick breads—that is, breads that rise thanks to a speedy chemical reaction, rather than through the far slower organic action of yeast. Most likely, we’ve all done that junior high chemistry experiment of mixing baking soda (an alkali, sometimes called a base) with vinegar (an acid) to create a bubbly volcano of carbon dioxide froth. If not, there’s no time like the present. Pour 1/4 cup vinegar into a tall glass and place it in the sink. Stir in 1 teaspoon baking soda and watch it go. When those bubbles get to work in a quick bread batter, they don’t fritter away into nothing. They’re stabilized (or trapped) by the flour’s glutens. And voilà, a fast and easy stand-in for yeast.
Despite our passion for speed, quick breads were not quick to catch on. They were an innovation of the late 1700s that took almost two centuries to bear fruit. That’s partly because baking soda was not the original leavener. That distinction goes to pearl ash (or potassium carbonate), a compound whose manufacturing process was patented by Samuel Hopkins on July 31, 1790. The making of pearl ash was a frugal venture, replete with Yankee ingenuity. It started with wood ashes, a household annoyance in colonial America. Hopkins took the ashes and soaked them in warm water in a one to ten ratio for twenty-four hours. The sediment was discarded; the resulting liquid was gray, viscous, and most likely carcinogenic. It was boiled down to produce an opaque, whitish residue, aka pearl ash, which produced that chemical froth of carbon dioxide when mixed with an acid and liquids (or acidic liquids, like soured milk, something housewives had in abundance before modern refrigeration).
Although a boon to bakers who could forgo the tedium of yeast, pearl ash never really caught on because it had the unfortunate side effect of creating soap when combined with fats like butter or lard—not exactly a taste sensation. But if not pearl ash, the thinking went, then surely something else would make bread fast, thanks to a similar chemical process.
The answer was found in nineteenth-century druggists’ pantries: sodium bicarbonate, now known as “baking soda.” This digestive aid could be used in the same way as pearl ash—that is, in the presence of an acid and a liquid—but with almost no soapy aftertaste. And it had homeopathic properties, to boot.
By the 1830s,American homemakers were heading off to their pharmacists for their baking needs. But why only use soured milk, which gives breads a certain whang. Why not use fresh milk? That would require acid in another form, a powdered form. And while we’re at it, why wait to put the alkali and acid together? If they need moisture to interact, why not put them together in a dry compound in advance?
American druggists were quick to sniff the winds of profitability—and they were soon combining sodium bicarbonate with another low-grade acid found on their shelves: cream of tartar. This is the acidic residue scraped out of wine casks after production; it was used at the time for a variety of health complaints. The resulting compound of baking soda and cream of tartar could be kept dry with a little corn starch to absorb any excess moisture.
But what about cream of tartar? Isn’t that associated with wine? Mustn’t it be, in Victorian terms, wicked? So—ever depressingly so—there arose a small industry of preachers and health reformers decrying 1) the lazy women who would want to forgo the rigors of yeast, and 2) their devilish helper in this indolence, this new-fangled leavener from wine.
In 1859, a fast-thinking Boston entrepreneur, Eben Norton Horsford, patented his answer: sodium bicarbonate and a different acid, calcium phosphate. He called his product “Horsford’s Cream of Tartar Substitute.” The name proved unwieldy—and unmarketable—so he repackaged it as “Rumford Baking Powder,” named for the professorship Horsford held at Harvard, the Rumford Chair of the Application of Science to the Useful Arts, but also named as a kind of elixir, a “powder,” like the other ones created during antebellum America (headache powders and the like), powders that could get the job done quickly, almost magically.
Now home cooks were whipping up batters without a yeast worry—except that the new baking powder worked too well. It reacted so quickly in the presence of liquids that any leavening was over by the time the batter hit the oven. So there was one final chapter in this story: in 1889, double-acting baking powder came along. A second acidic leavening agent was added to the mixture, an acid that reacted slowly in the presence of moisture, but quickly once heat was added—thus, “double-acting”: once with liquid, and again with heat.
And so you may think, with the quick-bread revolution under way, it was a short trip to the muffin’s cultural ascendancy, right?
Not so. There’s no mention of muffins in late nineteenth-century cookbooks. There’s not a single reference to muffins in any Boston Cooking School cookbook until 1923, eight years after Fanny Farmer’s death. And there’s not one reference to muffins on American menus archived in the New York Public Library from the 1920s and ’30s.
One problem may have been muffins’ homespun nature. They’re hardly the stuff of Parisian or Swiss bakers, and certainly not the highbrow confections that were increasingly the staples of East and West coast enclaves during the Jazz Age of the twentieth century.
Furthermore, muffins were originally not as sweet as we might imagine. One of the first muffin crazes came out of Battle Creek, Michigan, home of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s Seventh Day Adventist health camp and soon-to-be cereal factory. Bran muffins, of course, were among Kellogg’s many obsessions, both gastric and financial. He could sell more bran cereal by making it a necessary ingredient in recipes. Through his efforts, the muffin gained a reputation around 1920 as a kind of speedy purgative you could whip up every morning. Echoes of that heritage still trail muffins. It’s amazing how many people think they’re eating something healthy, despite the splendid combination of butter, sugar, and flour.
But healthy eating has never been a longlasting trend. Soon enough, the world wars were over; the Depression, a memory. Butter was no longer rationed. Muffin tins became nonstick; ovens, more conventional. Convenience reigned supreme.
And so muffins were on their way to utter excess. Ever-more-affluent Americans developed a taste for sweeter, richer treats, more like cake than bread. Bed-and-breakfasts and country inns undoubtedly spurred this fad along. Their chefs gave their citified patrons a light but high-fat dessert, even at breakfast.
Far be it from us to turn puritanical at the end of this story, but in the last decades of the twentieth century we’ve witnessed what we call the “cupcakeization” of muffins. Yes, to be palatable, muffins needed more sugar and fat, all Kellogg’s assertions about dry bran notwithstanding—but they certainly didn’t need the poundage under which some now labor.
It’s not that we’re fussy about sugar and butter. We did write The Ultimate Brownie Book, after all. Simply put, muffins aren’t cakes. They’re quick breads; they should have a breadlike texture. To that end, we’ve honored their down-home roots by using a variety of flavors, whole wheat and oat to name two of the most common in our recipes. And we’ve cut down the sugar. Don’t worry—the muffins are still sweet. Some, very sweet—just try the Fudge or Honey Muffins. But most are less sugary, more flavorful, and good for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
We’ve also included savory muffins, ones a tad unexpected to some. These veer farthest from the cupcake trend—Potato or Quiche Lorraine Muffins, for example. Any of these would make a nice accompaniment to a roast, a baked ham, or a Thanksgiving turkey. Think of them not just as bread, but as a side dish.
All that said, there are points where we’re less persnickety than some bakers. Some cookbooks stipulate what muffins should look like (in some cases, the exact angle of their peaks), or how they should feel when broken open. But what makes a muffin, by definition, is its shape from the tin and the quick bread technique used to create it. Just as we’re not wedded to one taste, we’re also not wedded to one texture. Muffins should be breadlike, yes—but there’s a world of latitude. So you’ll find a variety of textures in this book, just as you do when you walk into your local bake shop. Some are flat-topped; others are conical, even cracked. Some poof out like mushrooms; others widen out along the sides. Some specialty muffins—like Angel Food Muffins—don’t rise at all.
It’s a matter of which texture, or crumb, works best for what’s in the batter. Our preferences? We like a moister fruit muffin, a good platform for tart berries or sliced peaches; but we like a drier cocoa muffin, one that’s slightly heavier, denser, providing an intense taste of chocolate that’s not watered down.
And while we’re on the matter of preferences, there are a few omissions in this book. Yeast muffins, for one. We didn’t feel they had any place in a book which celebrates America’s favorite quick bread. Nor did we include a recipe simply because it could be baked or molded in a muffin tin, like meatloaf muffins or chicken salad muffins.
Omissions aside, there are hundreds of muffins here, from Lemon to Apple, Margarita to Daiquiri. You’ll find this variety presented alphabetically: Almond, Angel Food, Apple, Applesauce, Apricot, and so on.
Each recipe is followed by a series of variations, usually made with one addition to the batter, or one substitution. Here’s where we get creative—or go crazy, depending on your perspective. Pumpkin Muffins are all well and good, perfect for jam or jelly. But then there’s Cranberry Pumpkin Muffins, Marshmallow Nut Pumpkin Muffins, Orange Pecan Pumpkin Muffins, Pumpkin Seed Pumpkin Muffins, and Spiced Pumpkin Muffins. That’s enough variety to last us all a good long while, and certainly enough muffins to make everyone we know smile.