Simple recipes

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

Simple Recipes is a promotional cookbook issued by Brown & Polson Ltd. in 1930 to showcase their corn flour and 'Raisley' baking powder products. Rather than a general household manual, it is a manufacturer's recipe booklet designed to demonstrate the versatility of corn flour across the full span of a meal, from soups and sauces to puddings, cakes, and biscuits. The book opens with an explanatory introduction on corn flour's composition, digestibility, and culinary applications, positioning it as suitable for thickening, baking, and even feeding children. It then moves through a structured recipe sequence covering savory dishes, sweets, and baked goods, closing with practical baking guidance including oven temperatures and measurement conversions. With 79 anchored food records, the book offers a compact but wide-ranging view of home cooking techniques tied to a specific brand's ingredients. Modern readers will find it a useful window into early twentieth-century domestic cookery, commercial food marketing, and the home baking standards of its time, though its scope and voice remain shaped by its origin as product literature rather than an independent culinary text.

The book is organized in two main sections. Section 1 begins with an introduction to corn flour and the 'Raisley' baking powder product, followed by recipes progressing through soups, fish, sauces, vegetables, meat dishes, suet puddings, and cold desserts. Section 2 continues into cold sweets and custard-based dishes, then moves into baking proper, covering scones and rolls, small cakes, shortbread, biscuits, pastries, and larger cakes. The book concludes with technical guidance on baking techniques, ingredient selection, oven temperatures, and conversion tables for weights and measures. An index is noted among the headings, suggesting the book was designed for practical reference use.