Josie Collins
½ cup butter 3/4 cup sugar I 1/3 cup milk
2 eggs 1⅓ cups flour 2 teaspoons Royal baking powder 1 cup Jordan almonds, blanched and cut in pieces Mix ingredients in order given, and bake in individual cake pans.
The page has come through with two headings tangled together — the words "Rice Muffins" sit on top of what is plainly a single almond cake formula. Read the ingredient list as one recipe and the method makes sense.
- The butter is almost certainly a typoThe butter is very likely a typo — 1½ cups butter against 1⅓ cups flour is far more fat than a creamed batter of this size would normally carry. ½ cup is a plausible reading, but the original as printed cannot be trusted here.
- "I 1/3 cup milk"The leading character is probably a stray or broken figure. ⅓ cup milk is the likeliest reading, being in proportion to the flour and eggs.
- Jordan almondsAt this date the name meant the large, sweet almond of the Málaga type sold shelled for cooking, not the pastel sugar-shelled confection the name now brings to mind. Use whole raw almonds, blanched and roughly chopped.
- BlanchingThirty seconds in boiling water, then drain and pinch — the skins slip off. Dry the nuts before chopping or they will streak the batter grey.
- Royal baking powderA brand name, and these celebrity cookbooks were full of them. Any double-acting baking powder works at the same 2 teaspoons; if yours is single-acting, get the pans into the oven promptly.
- "Mix ingredients in order given"Taken literally this means adding in the printed sequence; it is usually read as the creaming method: butter and sugar beaten pale, eggs one at a time, then flour and baking powder alternately with the milk, almonds folded in last.
- Oven and pansNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits; individual cake pans means gem or muffin tins, buttered and floured, 20 to 25 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- YieldRoughly a dozen small cakes from this quantity of flour. Best eaten the day they are baked.
This comes from one of the celebrity cookbooks that flourished around the First World War, in which stage performers were asked to contribute a favourite dish and the resulting collection was sold partly as a novelty and partly for charity. Josie — more usually José — Collins was an English musical-comedy singer, daughter of the music-hall star Lottie Collins, and she worked on Broadway before returning to London fame; the recipe tells you almost nothing about her cooking and a good deal about how such books were assembled. The naming of Royal baking powder in the ingredient list is the tell: branded leavening was heavily promoted in American home baking, and its appearance by name in a supposedly personal recipe was routine. The garbled headings are equally characteristic — these volumes were set in haste.