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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts: McIlhenny
1/2 teaspoonful cinnamon, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, 2 cupfuls flour, Nun's Gems. 1 cupful sugar, 1 cupful butter, 5 eggs, teaspoonful cinnamon, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, Grated rind 1 lemon, cupfuls flour, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking powder, 1 cupful grated cocoanut.
Cream the butter and sugar, mix the beaten yolks of eggs, and add the lemon, cinnamon, and vanilla. Sift the flour and baking powder, mix with the batter, then fold in the cocoanut, and the whites of eggs whipped to a stiff froth. Bake half an hour in gem pans; when cool, dip each cake in white or chocolate frosting.
Macaroons. 1½ cupfuls almond paste, Whites 2 eggs, 1 cupful powdered sugar.
Mix the paste and sugar, then stir in the whites of eggs, which have been beaten stiff. Work with a spoon until the mixture is thoroughly blended, drop small teaspoonful paste into a pan which has been lined with buttered paper, put half a peanut in the center of each, and bake in a moderate oven until delicately brown. Lift the pan from the oven, take out the paper with the macaroons, lay for a minute on a damp towel, then with a palette knife you can slip each one off.
Two recipes from a branded booklet, printed with the compression typical of the form. One measurement has dropped out entirely, and both call for products sold under names that no longer mean anything at the store.
- The missing flour quantityThe ingredient list reads "cupfuls flour" with no number — a typesetting loss, not an instruction. Nothing in the method recovers it; with a cup each of butter and sugar, five eggs and a cup of coconut, a comparable period gem batter would take somewhere near two cups, but the original is genuinely ambiguous and you are guessing.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan with small oval or round cups; the number of cups varied from six to a dozen. A standard muffin tin does the job; grease it well. The recipe gives no yield, so the count is a guess.
- Branded ingredientsMcIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla and Calumet baking powder are brand names written into the ingredient list; the booklet is a McIlhenny promotion, though whether Calumet also paid for its mention here cannot be told from the page. Use one teaspoon of any good vanilla extract and one teaspoon of double-acting baking powder.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given for the gems; half an hour in small pans points to a moderate oven, 350F. Check at 18 to 20 minutes — modern pans are thinner than cast iron and these are small cakes.
- CocoanutPeriod grated coconut is unsweetened: either freshly grated, which is moist, or desiccated, which is dry. Sweetened flaked coconut will make the cakes noticeably sweeter and wetter; unsweetened desiccated is the closer match.
- Folding the whitesThe five whipped whites do much of the lifting, alongside the teaspoon of baking powder and the creamed butter. Fold them in last and stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- Macaroons: moderate oven350F, and "delicately brown" means the edges only. Almond-paste macaroons dry out and harden fast once they colour past pale gold.
- The damp towelLaying the hot paper on a damp cloth generates steam underneath and helps release the sticky bottoms. The paper here is buttered, so some will lift without it, but the step makes tearing far less likely. Wait the minute the recipe asks for before lifting.
- Almond paste, not marzipanAlmond paste is roughly half almonds and much less sweet than marzipan; the two are not interchangeable here, since the recipe adds its own cup of powdered sugar.
- YieldThe recipe gives no count; teaspoonfuls from this quantity of paste will make several dozen small cookies. The half peanut on top is a period flourish — a blanched almond half is the more usual finish now.
Both of these come from a promotional cookery booklet, the kind that flourished in the United States from the 1890s through the 1920s, in which a flavouring house or baking-powder company paid for the printing and got its name written into the ingredient lists — hence "McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla" and "Calumet baking powder" appearing where a general cookbook would simply say vanilla and baking powder. The recipes themselves are older than the advertising. Small rich cakes called nuns' cakes or nuns' biscuits appear in English receipt books well before 1800. The name is traditionally linked to convent baking — sweet confections were a genuine source of income for some religious houses — but this is received explanation rather than documented etymology, and the same convent story attached to the macaroon is folk tradition too. What marks this page as American and modern for its date is the chemical leavening in the gems; the half peanut pressed into each macaroon in place of the usual blanched almond is a cheaper domestic touch, though the booklet does not say why it was chosen.