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Fruit Puffs
One tablespoon of sugar, one cup of flour, one egg, one-fourth cup of butter, one-half cup of fruit (canned or fresh), one teaspoon
— Mrs. Susan Ives
of baking powder.
A bare ingredient list of the kind village committees collected by the dozen, with the compositor's line break dropping Mrs. Ives's name into the middle of the baking powder. What it does not give is any liquid, any pan, any oven, or any time — all of which have to be inferred from the type.
- The garbled lineRead it as "one teaspoon of baking powder," with "Mrs. Susan Ives" being the contributor's credit that the typesetter ran into the sentence. There is no missing ingredient at that point in the list.
- The missing liquidOne cup of flour with a single egg and a quarter cup of butter will not come together as a batter. Comparable puff and gem receipts of the period take about a third to a half cup of milk; the original simply omits it, and any figure is a reconstruction rather than a conversion.
- What a "puff" wasNot a choux pastry. In American community cookbooks of this era a fruit puff is usually a small, cake-like batter baked in gem pans or patty tins, with fruit folded through or dropped into the centre, though the word was applied loosely and some period puffs are closer to popovers.
- OvenNothing is stated. A modern reconstruction would bake these in small tins at around 350-375F for 18 to 22 minutes, until the tops spring back.
- Butter measureOne-fourth cup is 4 tablespoons, 2 oz, 57 g. Cream it with the tablespoon of sugar first: with so little sugar there is nothing to hold air unless the butter is properly softened.
- The fruitHalf a cup is a modest amount, and canned fruit should be drained hard and patted dry or the batter will slump around it. Chop anything larger than a berry; fold it in at the very end with two or three strokes.
- YieldAbout six standard muffin cups, or eight to ten small gem tins. Best eaten warm the day they are made.
- ServingPuffs of this kind were often sent to the table with a sweet pudding sauce or plain cream, which would compensate for the single tablespoon of sugar in the batter.
The Catskill Cook Book belongs to a genre that dominated American home cooking between the 1870s and the First World War: the community or church cookbook, in which each contributor sent in a favourite receipt over her own name. The results were compiled quickly and proofread lightly, which is exactly how "one teaspoon \—\ Mrs. Susan Ives \— of baking powder" ends up in print. The style of the receipt is diagnostic of its moment as well. Chemically leavened batters baked in small iron gem pans became a staple of the American kitchen after commercial baking powders spread widely in the second half of the nineteenth century, and a cook of the period was presumably expected to know without being told what heat her oven wanted, how much milk a cup of flour would take, and that a "puff" was a small tin-baked cake. The gaps in these lists are not carelessness so much as an assumption of shared competence.