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Melting
6 ozs. (3/4 cup) butter 8 ozs. (2 cups) cornstarch 3 ozs. (6 tablespoonfuls) sugar
What survives here is a proportion list rather than a working recipe: three ingredients by weight, no method, no oven, no yield. The ratio itself is the useful part, and it points clearly at a short, sandy biscuit of the melting-moments type.
- The method is missingNo mixing, shaping, temperature or time is given on this page. Treat the entry as a set of proportions to be slotted into a known shortbread technique rather than as instructions to follow.
- The weights and cups agreeThe weights and cup measures are roughly consistent -- 6 oz butter is 3/4 cup; 6 tablespoons of sugar is a little under 3 oz, and 2 cups of cornstarch a little over 8 oz depending on how it is packed. The equivalents follow period rounding conventions rather than exact modern figures.
- Cornstarch, not cornflour, not cornmealBritish books of the period say "cornflour" for what American shelves call cornstarch. It is not cornmeal, and substituting cornmeal here produces something gritty and inedible.
- Almost certainly short of flourPossibly short of flour -- a dough of pure cornstarch and butter has no gluten and would be very fragile to handle. Many biscuits of this family cut the cornstarch with plain flour, and it is possible a line has dropped out of the printing, though the page as it stands gives no evidence either way.
- Why cornstarch at allStarch dilutes the flour's protein and gives the very short, powdery, dissolving crumb the name refers to. It also makes the dough fragile and slow to brown, so these are baked pale.
- OvenThe page gives no oven. Biscuits of this type are usually baked moderately, around 325-350F, until set and barely coloured at the edges; that is a modern suggestion rather than anything the book states.
- YieldAt this size the mixture makes roughly two to three dozen small biscuits, depending on whether they are piped, rolled or dropped.
"Melting moments" is the standing British and colonial name for a small butter biscuit made short with cornstarch, and the name is descriptive rather than commemorative: the crumb is meant to collapse on the tongue. Refined cornstarch became a household staple only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when milling firms began selling it in packets as a thickener and a pudding base, and cookery writers promptly found uses for it beyond blancmange. What survives here is a page that gives the proportions in two systems of measurement and then stops.