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Almond Cookies
Beat to a hard sauce ¼ pound sweet butter and ¼ pound pulverized sugar (sifted). Add the yolks of 3 well-beaten eggs. When a smooth cream, add 4, ounces blanched and sliced almonds, and 6 ounces Five Roses flour (in which has been sifted 1 teaspoon baking powder).
Stir with a wooden spoon until a smooth paste. Use sugar in making the dough into balls, and set these 1 inch apart in greased pan. Wet the tops lightly and sprinkle with sugar and place an almond in the centre of each. Bake to a light straw color.
A rich egg-yolk shortbread dough, weighed rather than measured, from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company's Canadian flour book. The proportions are sound; only the oven instruction is missing.
- "Beat to a hard sauce"Hard sauce is the creamed butter-and-sugar mixture served on plum pudding, usually flavoured with brandy or vanilla. That is all this direction asks for: butter and sugar beaten until pale, smooth and fluffy, and it is worth doing thoroughly.
- The weights in cups¼ lb butter is 1 stick (½ cup); 6 oz flour is about 1⅓ cups; 4 oz almonds is roughly 1 to 1⅓ cups sliced. ¼ lb pulverized sugar measures about ½ cup if it is superfine, nearer 1 cup if it is powdered -- one more reason weighing is more reliable here than measuring.
- Pulverized sugarPeriod pulverized sugar was granulated sugar ground fine, closer to today's superfine (caster) sugar than to confectioners'. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and gives a softer, more powdery cooky; caster sugar is nearer the original texture.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour. Ordinary all-purpose works; bleached cake flour is softer and will give a slacker, more fragile dough.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 325-350F for 12-15 minutes. "A light straw color" means the edges are just set and barely gold — these are meant to stay pale, and they firm up as they cool.
- Sugaring your hands"Use sugar in making the dough into balls" means dusting your palms with sugar rather than flour. The dough is soft; chilling it 30 minutes makes rolling far easier.
- The whole almond on topPress it in firmly rather than resting it on the surface — the cookies spread a little and a loose almond will slide off. Blanched almonds look right for the period; skin-on will darken faster than the cooky.
- YieldAbout 3 dozen small cookies from balls of roughly a rounded teaspoon. One inch apart is close; allow 1½ inches if your dough is on the soft side.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the brand's flour, which makes it one of the better records of early twentieth-century home baking in Canada. This cooky belongs to a family of European almond-and-egg-yolk shortbreads -- the same idea underlies German Mandelplätzchen and various Dutch and Scandinavian almond bakes.