Until I read a reader's request in a hundred-year-old magazine, I never thought about whether muffins should have a flat top:
Tell me why my muffins are flat on top?
Here's the response:
Muffins Flat on Top
We could no be hired to tell you how to make muffins that are not flat on top, because the test of the perfect muffin is a flat top. It is like cake, it should be flat as the floor on top, and if it is not there is something wrong with either the making or the baking. To be sure, we often have hummocky muffins and hummocky cake served to us in places where they ought to know better - and they even taste good, yet we eat them with inward grief. We congratulate you that you have achieved that by-no-means easy or common task, the flat-topped muffin. Long may you continue to make them and no other kind.
American Cookery (June/July, 1923)
I've made various types of muffins a half dozen times across the years for this blog. I clicked through those posts and was appalled to discover that my muffins do not have flat tops.
Oh dear, I make hummocky muffins. Maybe the person who responded was writing about English muffins, but somehow I think not. When you make muffins, do they have a flat top?
When I did this post I also learned a new word. "Hummocky" means a rounded mound of earth, knoll or a pile of ice, ridge.
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