The tea-time recipe book (B book)

From the librarian's dossier · AI-generated, grounded in the scanned text

The Tea-Time Recipe Book is a compact baking manual published in 1900 by Brown & Polson, a manufacturer of Paisley Flour and corn flour. Rather than a general household cookbook, it is essentially a branded promotional publication built around demonstrating the versatility of the company's products as substitutes for chemical leavening agents. The book walks the reader through the basics of home baking, from choosing utensils and preparing ingredients to mixing methods and oven management, before moving into a numbered sequence of roughly fifty-five recipes covering breads, scones, muffins, small cakes, buns, biscuits, pastries, and specialty cakes. It closes with practical reference material, including weights and measures conversions and a catalog of baking equipment sold by the manufacturer. For modern readers interested in turn-of-the-century domestic baking, tea-time customs, and the marketing strategies of food manufacturers who used cookbooks as advertising vehicles, this slim volume offers a focused, product-driven window into that world. It is not a comprehensive culinary reference but a targeted guide meant to sell flour through recipes.

The book is organized into two mechanically gated sections. Section 1 opens with introductory material on baking fundamentals, including utensils, ingredient selection, and mixing techniques, before presenting a numbered sequence of recipes beginning with milk breads, scones, and muffins, and progressing through small cakes, buns, biscuits, and pastries. Section 2 continues the numbered recipe sequence from roughly No. 35 through No. 55, covering tartlets, choux pastry, shortbread, gingerbread, sponge and fruit cakes, and proprietary specialty cakes, before ending with a weights and measures reference table and a catalog of baking equipment and molds available for purchase from the manufacturer.