Muffins
Mmmm…
What took me so long to bite into a morning glory muffin? What people have been enjoying since its introduction in a small café in Nantucket in 1978, I have just discovered. No, I didn’t travel to Pam McKinstry’s Morning Glory Café to find one (The trip would have been in vain: the shop closed in 1994). I simply walked into a local coffee shop. I also could have shopped for these ingredient-packed muffins at just about any grocery store—or ordered them online and had them delivered to my door. Yum—breakfast-ready morning glory muffins plucked from the freezer and warmed in the microwave.
Having warm, ready-made muffins is nothing new. The Victorians had their “muffin men”, commonly bakers’ sons who sold hot muffins in the streets of London’s West End for half a penny. (I paid a tad more for my muffins.) These were not the morning glory muffins that I gladly scarf down with a cup of tea, but bread-like buns made with yeast. Often called tea cakes, they might have been more akin to what we call English muffins, which, ironically, were invented in America.
The English muffin landed in a New York City bakery in 1880 thanks to a British immigrant to New York named Samuel Bath Thomas. Shrewdly, Thomas had brought with him a recipe for a crumpet-like yeast bread he called a toaster crumpet. It was a hit with restaurateurs and hoteliers who offered guests this upscale toast. Thomas’ is the crème de la crème of English muffins, and I’d walk a mile to find them, but in recent months they’ve proved elusive. Their disappearance is as wrapped in mystery as the secret recipe that produces their distinctive nooks and crannies. I don’t know if their vanishing act has anything to do with how a toaster crumpet became an English muffin sold in America and eventually produced by a company based in Mexico, but it’s a fascinating story that author and raconteur Malcolm Gladwell tells much better than I could, so grab a muffin have a listen to his Revisionist History podcast listed in Second Helpings, below.
English muffins bear little resemblance to puffed-up morning glory muffins. How the slim English muffin got a rise has to do with the invention of an ingredient that arrived on bakers’ shelves in 1856. Bread-like muffins rely on yeast for leavening, but modern cake-like muffins get their oomph from a product invented by an American scientist named Eben Norton Horsford. Baking powder transformed a once tedious and unreliable process of creating the carbon dioxide that makes baked goods rise. Before Horsford’s invention, leavening depended on various oddball ingredients, from wood ashes and lye to sour milk and animal bones. Horsford’s recipe combined baking soda with monocalcium phosphate mixed with cornstarch to create a “double-acting” baking powder that works in two stages: first priming the moist batter with gases to create the first rise, followed by a second rise which takes place when exposed to the heat of the oven.
The invention of baking powder gave rise to the popularity of quick breads. These batter-based “breads” form the basis of the banana breads, pancakes and brownies we bake today. But, back in the 19th century, making muffins with these batters was an idea waiting for the right baking dish—the muffin tin. The precursor to the modern muffin tin was a cast iron “egg pan”. Invented by Bostonian, Nathaniel Waterman in 1859, these hefty pans featured several shallow, individual cups connected together, typically in multiples of 8, 11 or 12. They were designed to bake small, whole wheat graham flour muffins called gems, which looked a lot like muffin tops without the base. Eventually, the pans used to bake gems became known as gem pans.
The design and materials used to make muffin pans changed over the course of the 20th and into the 21st centuries. Mass manufacturing in the early 1900s led to pans made of steel lined with tin that heated quickly. During the ’30s and ’40s, aluminum took over and 12-cup pans became standard. The Teflon wave produced easy to clean non-stick pans in the 1960s and molded silicone muffin cups made their debut in the 1990s.
With these changes in bakeware design, from diminutive gems, jumbo muffins grew. The first time I saw a jumbo muffin was at the Marvelous Mmmuffins kiosk at the Eaton Centre in Toronto. A Canada-wide chain popular in the 1980s and ’90s, Mmmuffins were baked on-site, their aromas calling out to shoppers like me, who invariably stopped to snack on one of the whopping four-ounce muffins. (If I remember correctly, my favourite was butterscotch-pecan).
Marvelous Mmmuffins’ butterscotch-pecan jumbo muffins is where my dalliance with muffins ended—until the day I walked into a cafe and discovered the morning glory muffin. Sigh.
Want more about muffins? Have some…
Second Helpings
The Formula | Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History
Another thing about enjoying a Morning Glory muffin with coffee (or tea in your case) is that we can happily fool ourselves about how much healthier it is than a pastry or a croissant. Also, do you remember the Seinfeld episode about making only muffin tops? Interesting history.