Learn about English muffin history from a classic recipe and enjoy a bread with nearly 150 years of tradition and popularity throughout the world.
In the mid-19th century, hundreds of vendors known as “muffin men” plied the streets of London, ringing a bell announcing still-warm bread for sale. Londoners wanted English muffins delivered warm to their doorsteps – a bread so good that thousands of men over the course of nearly 150 years supported their families by selling warm muffins for toasting at home. You, too, can enjoy freshly made English muffins by following this simple, traditional recipe.
What Are English Muffins Called in England?
This bread is called “English” in the United States to distinguish it from our American-style cake muffins. In England, the bread known simply as a “muffin” hasn’t really changed since Hannah Glasse published what may be the first recorded muffin recipe in her hugely popular 1747 cookbook, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
English Muffin History: A Classic Cookbook
Like pancakes, English muffins are griddle-baked breads made with a standard soft bread dough – Hannah Glasse called it “light” – not enriched with milk or eggs. To make them at home, you can prepare dough using the ingredients in the following recipe from Glasse’s 1747 book, or by mixing up any recipe for French bread. Note that many modern English muffin recipes include milk, butter, and sugar, and these ingredients will make the bread even softer. You can mix up whatever dough suits your taste. Your homemade version will always have an edge over packaged goods from a grocery store.
Think of the following instructions as a single muffin recipe that can produce two different styles of bread. Today, we usually split and toast a cold English muffin and eat the halves separately. But people in Glasse’s time toasted the muffin immediately after baking, before it got cold. They ate the whole muffin by biting into it as a warm, buttery sandwich. The traditional muffin is experienced as crispness when the teeth first bite through the crust, followed by an incredibly soft, buttery loveliness.
Here’s how Glasse explained it in her book: “When you eat them, toast them with a fork crisp on both sides, then with your hand pull them open, and they will be like a honeycomb; lay in as much butter as you intend to use, then clap them together again, and set it by the fire. When you think the butter is melted turn them, that both sides may be buttered alike, but don’t touch them with a knife, either to spread or cut them open, if you do they will be as heavy as lead, only when they are quite buttered and done, you may cut them across with a knife.”
Now that I’ve discovered the original system, I like to eat a couple of Glasse’s style of muffins immediately as muffin toast, and let the rest cool to eat as buttered toast with marmalade and in eggs Benedict (a toasted muffin topped with Canadian bacon, a poached egg, and hollandaise sauce).
The great American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald recorded a traditional English song about London’s muffin men in 1941. Search online for her recording of “The Muffin Man” for the perfect music to make these muffins by.
English Muffin History Through a Traditional Recipe
If you usually make sandwich breads, you’ll find English muffin dough is much wetter and stickier. When working with a sticky bread dough, rub your hands with a little cooking oil or work the dough with wet hands. I dip my hands in a bowl of water at my work area.
If you plan to try the historic toasting method, requiring the bread to still be warm from the griddle, then have a couple of clean dish towels handy so you can wrap the muffins as soon as they come off the griddle.
I always make this dough in advance and store it, covered, in the refrigerator. Refrigerating the dough will allow you to make just a few muffins in the morning for breakfast or brunch without having to bake off the entire batch. And, as with all yeasted doughs, time spent in the refrigerator will develop flavor. Aim to use up all the dough within a few days. You must use plain yeast without enzymes and dough conditioners if you intend to refrigerate the dough, because dough made with conditioned yeast won’t rise properly in the fridge.
Yield: about 10 muffins.
- 3-1/2 cups unbleached, all-purpose white flour
- 1-1/2 teaspoons salt
- 1-1/2 teaspoons yeast
- 1-1/2 cups warm water, 95 degrees Fahrenheit
- Extra flour and cornmeal for dusting
Mixing and Rising the Dough
- In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, and yeast. Add the warm water and mix to form a rough dough.
- Turn out dough onto a clean countertop to knead. Have a bowl of water handy so you can keep your hands wet for easier handling of sticky dough. Knead the dough until it’s elastic, 2 to 3 minutes.
- Place dough in a lightly oiled bowl, and cover. Either refrigerate to use the following day, or let rise in a warm place until doubled. If you use a proofing oven, set it to 85 degrees.
- When ready to cut the dough, remove it from refrigerator (if applicable). Dust a clean work surface with cornmeal. Lightly dust the dough inside the bowl with flour, and then turn onto a work surface. Lightly dust the top of the dough with flour. Gently press to degas, then continue gently flattening the dough with your hands. When the dough is about 1 inch thick, turn it over and continue pressing until it’s 1/2 inch thick. A rolling pin is helpful when you rework the dough left over from the first flattening, as it may be too stiff to flatten with your hands.
- Place a shallow bowl containing a small amount of flour at your work area. With a sturdy drinking glass, cut out muffin disks 3 to 4 inches in diameter. Dip the glass rim into the bowl of flour before making each cut. Place dough disks on a platter dusted with cornmeal, and cover.
Griddle Baking Your English Muffins
Unless you have a temperature-controlled induction cooktop that’ll produce an even temperature across the cooking surface, your challenge will be to keep the griddle hot enough to bake the muffins but also cool enough they won’t color.
Cast-iron cookware is the best equipment for making English muffins. I also recommend a heat diffuser to put under your griddle or frying pan; in lieu of this, you can place a second cast-iron pan under the first to help distribute the heat evenly. An infrared thermometer will help you monitor the surface temperature of the cooking surface, but you can also use your own judgment and learn through trial and error. Although neither of these tools is required, they’ll help give you a sense of control over the baking.
- After you’ve cut the muffin disks, begin heating the griddle and heat diffuser (or second cast-iron pan), if using, stacked on top of each other on the cooktop. Allow 30 minutes for the griddle’s temperature to stabilize at about 325 degrees. Always err on the baking surface being too cool rather than too hot. Your aim is to produce a fully baked muffin that remains pale, and the bread will begin to color when the griddle is above 325 degrees.
- With a spatula, flip the muffins when they’ve nearly doubled in height, after 4 to 5 minutes. The dough will still be raw in the middle of the muffins.
- After baking the muffins for a few minutes on the second side, flip them back to the first side. Continue flipping them every few minutes.
English muffins are easy to slide around on the cooking surface while they’re baking. To bake them as evenly as possible, I like to slide the disks around on the griddle so they’re not always in the same spot. If the muffins begin to brown, the griddle is too hot, and you should remove the pan from the heat for a short time until it cools down slightly. - The muffins will be fully baked in about 20 minutes. A thin wooden skewer inserted into the muffin’s waist should come out fairly clean, with only a few small bits of sticky dough clinging to it.
If you want to make Glasse’s crispy muffins, proceed immediately to the following instructions. If you want to eat them in the American style, let the muffins cool to room temperature and divide them in half by pushing the tines of a dinner fork into the muffin waist, working the tines around the waist, and then prying the halves apart.
Historic Muffin Toast
Wrap the baked muffins in a towel as soon as you take them off the griddle. To follow Glasse’s recipe, the muffins must be toasted and buttered while still warm from the first baking to maintain a contrast between the crisp crust and the soft, buttered interior. Luckily, muffins cool surprisingly slowly, so they’ll still be about 145 degrees after an hour wrapped in cloth.
- Toast the muffin on the end of a fork in front of a wood fire or (more practically) under a broiler or inside a toaster oven until both sides are brown. The interior temperature will rise above 210 degrees.
- With your fingers, pry the muffin in half at the waist. Place a good-sized piece of butter inside, close the halves like a sandwich, and then toast in front of a wood fire or inside a 225-degree oven. Flip after a couple of minutes so the butter will melt into both sides.
- After a few minutes, remove the muffin from the heat. Serve immediately by cutting the muffin in half across the top like a sandwich.
William Rubel writes about bread, hearth cooking, and traditional foodways. He’s the author of Bread: A Global History and the founder and director emeritus of Stone Soup magazine. He lives and bakes English muffins in California with his daughter.
