Molly Pearson
ORANGE SAUCE
½ pint water 2 oz. sugar Rind and juice 2 oranges Juice 1 lemon 1 teaspoon corn flour Boil water, oranges, rind and juice, and sugar for 10 minutes, strain and thicken with corn flour. once.
Unlike so many of your American women I am "no cook." Until I came to this country I do not think I ever cooked anything but a beef-steak pie It is now a sacred memory handed down to coming generations. Having lived for so many years in hotels in America I have longed for home cooking and have recently made a few attempts with more or less success. Molly Pearson 1 cup corn meal 3/4 cup flour
CORN CAKE
3½ teaspoons Royal baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup molasses 3/4 cup milk 1 egg 1 tablespoon melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients, add molasses, milk, egg well beaten and butter. Bake in shallow buttered pan twenty minutes.
Best wishes,
Two unrelated recipes share this page: a British-style orange sauce and an American corn cake. The sauce is written in Pearson's Scottish idiom, the cake in the standardised American cup measures of the period.
- Corn flour is cornstarchIn British usage "corn flour" means cornstarch, not the finely ground maize sold under that name in the United States. One teaspoon will barely thicken this quantity of liquid; slake it in cold water before stirring it in, and expect a thin pouring sauce rather than a glaze.
- Which pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, a US pint 16. Given Pearson's background the intended 1½ pints is probably 30 fl oz; at 24 fl oz the sauce will simply be shorter and sharper. Either reduces noticeably over ten minutes of boiling.
- RindPare the zest in strips with a peeler and leave the white pith behind. Boiled ten minutes, pith turns the sauce bitter. Strain it all out as directed.
- What the sauce is forA sweet fruit sauce of this kind was poured over steamed and baked puddings, sponge, or plain cake. The recipe gives no yield; after ten minutes' boiling you will have somewhat less than the 1½ pints you started with, enough for several servings.
- Corn cake ovenNo temperature is given; the book assumes the cook knows her own oven. Twenty minutes in a shallow pan implies a fairly hot oven, and modern corn cake recipes of this type are usually baked around 400-425F. Baked cooler, it is likely to need longer than twenty minutes.
- CornmealUse plain yellow or white cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not the degerminated fine grind sold as corn flour in the US. Medium grind gives the texture the recipe expects.
- Baking powderThree and a half teaspoons to one and three-quarter cups of dry ingredients is high and will taste of it; three teaspoons is ample. Contributors often named a brand, and Royal's name recurs in printed recipes of the period, though nothing on the page shows why it appears here. Note that Royal was then a cream-of-tartar powder, which acts faster than a modern double-acting one.
- Pan and yield"Shallow buttered pan" is all the direction given; a small shallow tin such as an 8-inch square, filled an inch or so deep, suits the quantity. Cakes of this kind are best eaten warm the day they are made.
Molly Pearson was an actress of Scottish background who made her career on the American stage, best remembered for the title role in Bunty Pulls the Strings, the Scots comedy that ran in New York in the early 1910s. Her note is candid about the limits of a touring performer's kitchen: years in hotels, one beef-steak pie to her name, and a recent turn toward home cooking. Orange sauce thickened with corn flour is straightforwardly British pudding cookery; corn cake with molasses and baking powder is thoroughly American. Celebrity cookbooks of this kind were often charity ventures, assembled by writing to well-known people and printing whatever came back, which may account for the unevenness of the contributions. The page begins mid-sentence because it carries over the tail of a recipe from the preceding page.