Sidney Drew
Gibbs Mason
APRICOT SORBET
Rub one can of apricots through a sieve and add the syrup. Mix in one cup sugar, half a cup wine and quarter cup of lemon juice. Freeze. Whip a pint of cream to a stiff whip and fold it into the mixture.
Let stand an hour and a half, then serve in sorbet glasses.
May I offer this as my favorite self-made dish? I like a lot of other things, but cannot seem to learn to make them myself without a too-intimate association with the hot stove.
Truly yours,
JIMMIE POWERS
"Of the comedian's dish I eat the air." て
RICE MUFFINS
1/4 cup butter I 1/3 cup sugar 1 egg ½ cup milk 1½ cups flour 2½ teaspoons baking powder Cream the butter; add sugar well beaten; sift baking powder with flour, and add to the first mixture, alternating with milk. twenty-five minutes. alternating with milk. Bake in buttered tin gems Sincerest wishes,
Two contributions run together on this page: a frozen apricot cream from James T. Powers and a batch of gem-pan muffins from Gibbs Mason. Both are workable, but each has a gap in the printing worth knowing about before you start.
- The muffins have lost their riceThe title promises rice muffins and the ingredient list contains none. Recipes of this type generally fold in cold cooked rice, added with the milk; without it you have a plain sweet muffin. Whether the omission is in the printed book or an artefact of this transcription is not clear — the surrounding text is also garbled.
- Sugar, and a garbled mixing lineThe sugar quantity was checked against the printed page and stands at 1/3 cup, which suits 1 1/2 cups flour. The mixing instruction is still printed twice and the egg is never called for again: beat it into the creamed butter and sugar, and bake the gems about twenty-five minutes.
- Gem tins and oven heat"Buttered tin gems" means cast-iron or tinned gem pans, the forerunners of the muffin tin; a standard 12-cup muffin pan is the direct substitute. No temperature is given: 400F for the stated twenty-five minutes suits a muffin of this size, and grease the cups well since there are no papers in this scheme.
- "Add sugar well beaten"Read this as creaming the sugar into the butter thoroughly, then beating in the egg, which appears in the ingredient list but is never mentioned in the printed method.
- One can of apricotsCan sizes of the period varied, commonly larger than today's standard tin, so a modern 15 oz can with its syrup is a workable but approximate substitute. Rubbing through a sieve removes skin and fibre.
- Freeze, then foldThis is not a sorbet in the current sense but a frozen apricot cream, closer to a semifreddo. Freeze the sweetened puree until it is a stiff slush, not solid, or the whipped cream will not fold in without deflating. The half cup of wine keeps it soft; a fully hard block will resist you.
- The resting hour and a halfAfter folding, the mixture goes back into the freezer to firm, which is what the standing time is for. Serve it before it freezes hard through; it is at its best still spoonable.
- YieldThe sorbet gives roughly six to eight glasses. The muffin batter fills about a dozen gem cups.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries collected recipes solicited from stage and early film performers, printed with their sign-offs and often their jokes intact, which is why a dish here arrives with a letter attached. The signature reads "Jimmie Powers," most likely James T. Powers, a musical comedian of the period, and his note about avoiding "too-intimate association with the hot stove" explains the choice: a canned-fruit ice needs no cooking at all, only a sieve and a cold place. That was a genuine convenience in 1916, when canned apricots were a reliable pantry staple, though freezing at home at that date still generally meant ice and salt rather than a mechanical refrigerator. The line "Of the comedian's dish I eat the air" plays on Hamlet's "I eat the air, promise-crammed" — the sort of literary wink the book's theatrical contributors enjoyed. Rice muffins belong to an older domestic tradition of stretching a flour batter with cooked grain, found in American cookbooks through the nineteenth century, which makes the missing rice in this printing all the more conspicuous.