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Boston Drop Cookies
1 cup butter ½ cup sugar 3 eggs 1 teaspoon soda 1½ teaspoons hot water 1¼ cups Five Roses flour ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 cup currants.
Drop on buttered tins and bake quickly.
A drop cookie of the plainest kind, with the fat-to-flour ratio running unusually high — expect a thin, crisp, lacy cookie rather than a domed one.
- Check the flour before you commitOne cup of butter to 1¼ cups flour is very rich even by the standards of the period, and the dough will spread into thin sheets on the tray. Bake one test cookie first; if it runs together, work in flour a few tablespoons at a time until a dropped spoonful holds a mound.
- "Bake quickly"Period readings for a quick oven vary, roughly 400-425F; for a thin butter-heavy cookie 400F is the practical reading of the instruction — hot enough to set the edges before the dough floods, without scorching the currants. Six to nine minutes is usually enough.
- Soda and hot waterDissolving the soda in a spoonful or two of hot water before it goes in was standard practice with lump-prone soda; it prevents the bitter yellow specks you get from undispersed bicarbonate. Add it last, then get the trays into the oven promptly.
- No acid in the batterThere is nothing sour here — no molasses, buttermilk or sour milk — so the teaspoon of soda has little to react with and works mainly as a browning and spreading agent. Do not increase it; more soda in an unacidified dough tastes soapy.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, the small dried grape sold near the raisins, not fresh red or black currants. Plump them five minutes in hot water and drain well if they are hard, or they will draw moisture from the dough.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose flour milled from hard spring wheat, somewhat stronger than most American all-purpose. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose is the closest substitute; bread flour will make the cookies tougher than intended.
- Buttered tinsWith this much butter in the dough the greasing is optional; parchment is better still, since the thin edges tear when lifted from a bare sheet. Let the cookies firm on the tray for a minute before moving them.
- YieldRoughly three to four dozen small cookies from teaspoonfuls dropped two inches apart. They crisp as they cool and keep well in a tin.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which is why the ingredient list names the brand and why the method runs to a single line. Contributors were writing for other experienced cooks who knew what a drop cooky was and needed only the proportions. The "Boston" in the title may be doing the work such city names often did in turn-of-the-century North American cookbooks: signalling plainness, thrift and Yankee respectability rather than any documented connection to the place. Currants and cinnamon were a cheap way to flavour a keeping cookie in a house that already had butter and eggs.