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1 teaspoonful baking powder 2 eggs ½ teaspoonful rose extract Cream the butter and sugar thoroughly together, beat up the eggs and add them alternately with the cornstarch mixed with the baking powder, then add the rose extract. Divide the mixture into buttered and floured gem pans and bake in a moderate oven for ten minutes.
The ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — the butter, sugar and cornstarch quantities are missing from the printed text — so this needs reconstruction before it can be baked. What survives tells you clearly what kind of cake it is: a small, pale, tender rose-scented gem made with cornstarch in place of flour.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the baking powder, eggs and rose extract are given. The original figures are not recoverable and any number offered would be a guess.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron pan of small, deep, rounded cups — the ancestor of the muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, though the cups are shallower and wider, so watch the timing.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; read "moderate" as somewhere around 350F. At that heat ten minutes is plausible for very small gems; expect twelve to fifteen in a modern muffin tin, and pull them when the tops spring back and the edges just colour.
- Cornstarch, not flourWith no wheat flour there is no gluten, so the crumb is short and fragile. Do not beat the batter after the cornstarch goes in beyond what is needed to combine, and let them cool in the pan a few minutes before turning out or they will break.
- Rose extractA teaspoon and a half of a modern concentrated rose extract may well taste of soap. Modern rose water is generally milder than a concentrated extract and can be used at something near the stated quantity; a modern extract should be cut to a few drops and tasted.
- Alternately with the eggsThe instruction means adding beaten egg and the cornstarch-baking powder mixture in turns, a few spoonfuls at a time, which helps keep the creamed butter from splitting.
- YieldWith the butter, sugar and cornstarch quantities missing the yield cannot really be worked out; a two-egg batter of this kind would probably fill something like a dozen small gem cups, or eight to ten standard muffin cups.
Cornstarch cakes were a minor Victorian and Edwardian fashion, promoted in the pamphlet cookbooks issued by starch manufacturers, who had an obvious interest in finding uses for their product beyond thickening sauces and blancmange. The appeal was a very white, very fine crumb — a mark of refinement in an era when dark, coarse cake read as plain cooking. Rose was one of the older flavourings in the English repertoire, carried down from a time when rose water was as ordinary a kitchen bottle as vanilla is now, and its persistence in books of this period is a survival rather than a novelty; by the 1920s it had largely given way to vanilla and almond. Gem pans, meanwhile, were an American cast-iron staple sold in dozens of patterns.