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Aunt Mary's Cookies
2 cups white sugar 2 cups butter 4 eggs (well beaten) 5 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons soda 4 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon salt Flavour to taste (nutmeg or ratafia).
Roll not too thin and sprinkle with white sugar. Bake 10 minutes in quick For a change, press a raisin or nut-meat in centre of each. A piece of peel could likewise serve. oven.
A plain rolled sugar cooky in the old proportion of equal sugar and butter, leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than baking powder. The text has been scrambled by the typesetter: the last line belongs to the baking instruction, which should read "Bake 10 minutes in quick oven."
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Rolled cookies this rich colour fast, so check at 7 minutes; 10 is the outside limit for a thicker cut.
- Soda and cream of tartarTwo teaspoons soda to four of cream of tartar is single-acting baking powder made in the bowl, and it begins working the moment liquid touches it. Sift the soda, cream of tartar and salt with the flour, and get the trays into the oven without long delays.
- Butter measure2 cups butter is 1 lb, four sticks. If using salted butter, cut the added salt to half a teaspoon.
- RatafiaAn almond-scented flavouring, historically made with bitter almond or peach kernels. Modern almond extract is the direct substitute; use about a teaspoon, as it is far stronger than the old homemade essences.
- FlourFive Roses was a Canadian flour milled from hard spring wheat and sold for all household baking. All-purpose works; measure the 5 cups by spooning into the cup and levelling, or the dough turns dry and cracks at the edges when rolled.
- "Not too thin"About 1/4 inch. Thinner and the 10-minute bake will scorch them; the sugar sprinkled on top before baking gives a sparkling, crisp top.
- Handling the doughWith a pound of butter this dough is soft at room temperature. Chill it at least an hour before rolling, and work with a third of it at a time, keeping the rest cold.
- YieldRoughly 7 to 8 dozen 2-inch cookies. The recipe halves cleanly if that is more than the jar needs.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and given away or sold cheaply to promote its Five Roses flour; it became one of the most widely owned kitchen books in Canada in the early twentieth century, and much of its content was contributed by the housewives who used the flour. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening points to a household still mixing its own baking powder, a habit that persisted in home kitchens well after commercial tins were on the shelf. Ratafia, the alternative flavouring, was a general term for an almond- or fruit-kernel cordial and, by extension, the almond essence used in baking; it was still being offered as an option in this book in the early twentieth century.