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Ammonia Cookies
1 ounce pulverized ammonia 2 cups milk or sweet cream 3 cups white sugar 1 cup butter 2 eggs (beaten light) Five Roses flour to roll thin Flavouring to suit.
Put ammonia into milk and warm till it is thoroughly dissolved. Mix ingredients as usual and roll out thin. Sprinkle with sugar and bake in fairly hot oven.
A rolled sugar cooky leavened with baker's ammonia, which gives a dry, crisp snap that baking powder cannot match. The recipe assumes you know what "ammonia" meant on a 1913 grocery list, and gives no flour quantity at all.
- What the ammonia is"Pulverized ammonia" is ammonium carbonate, also sold as baker's ammonia or hartshorn, a dry white leavening powder still available from baking suppliers and Scandinavian and German grocers. It is not household ammonia, which is a cleaning solution and is not food. If you cannot source the powder, make a different cooky rather than substituting.
- The quantity is for a very large batchAn ounce by weight is roughly two tablespoons, which suits the scale here: 3 cups sugar, a cup of butter and two cups of milk will take somewhere near 8 to 10 cups of flour. Modern recipes for a single sheet of cookies use a teaspoon or two. Scale the ammonia down in the same proportion if you cut the batch.
- Roll thin, and mean itAmmonium carbonate breaks down into ammonia gas, carbon dioxide and water, and the gas has to escape during baking. In a thin, dry cooky it does; in anything thick or moist, it stays trapped and the finished cooky tastes sharply of ammonia. This is the hinge of the recipe.
- The smellThe kitchen will smell strongly of ammonia while the trays are in the oven. That is expected, and it dissipates as the cookies cool. Ventilate and do not open the oven repeatedly to check.
- Flour "to roll thin"The original leaves this to judgement. Add flour until the dough is firm enough to roll at about an eighth of an inch without tearing or sticking, then chill it before rolling; a soft dough will fight you.
- Oven temperature"Fairly hot" is not a fixed figure; a hot oven in this period is usually reckoned somewhere in the 375 to 425F range, so treat 400F as an approximation. These bake quickly, 6 to 10 minutes depending on thickness, and are done when the edges just colour.
- Dissolving the ammoniaWarm the milk only to blood heat. Ammonium carbonate begins giving off gas readily with heat, and scalding the milk wastes the leavening before it reaches the dough.
- FlavouringThe recipe leaves this open; lemon extract, nutmeg, cardamom or caraway all suit this style of cooky. Use about a tablespoon of extract or two teaspoons of ground spice for the full batch.
- Yield and keepingThe full quantity makes several dozen thin cookies. They keep well in a tin, and unlike baking-powder cookies they stay crisp rather than softening.
Baker's ammonia is among the older chemical leaveners, in use in European baking before baking soda. It was originally obtained by distilling the antlers of deer, which is why old recipes and some modern packages still call it hartshorn or salt of hartshorn. It survives chiefly in northern European traditions -- German Springerle and Ammoniakpl") Scandinavian holiday cookies -- because it produces a dryness and shatter in thin cookies that baking powder leaves flat. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book, a collection of recipes contributed by Canadian housewives and published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, shows how long the older leavening held on in home kitchens after baking powder had become the commercial standard.