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Bran Drops
1 cup bran. 1½ cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 egg Butter size of egg 1 cup sugar Milk or water.
Mix with milk or water until of about the consistency of fruit cake. Drop by spoonfuls on a greased dripping pan. Bake in quick oven.
A plain drop cookie from the Five Roses collection, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what the dough should look like. Two things need sorting before you start: the missing bran and the missing liquid measure.
- The bran is missingThe title promises bran but the ingredient list has none. If you want it to match its name, replace about ½ cup of the flour with unprocessed wheat bran; if not, treat it as a sugar drop cookie.
- "Butter size of egg"About 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Cream it with the sugar first, then beat in the egg, then alternate flour and liquid.
- How much milkThe original gives no quantity. Start with 2 tablespoons and add a teaspoon at a time; "consistency of fruit cake" means a stiff batter that holds its shape on the spoon and does not pour.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. At that heat the drops set fast and stay domed; watch them from seven minutes on, as a cup of sugar in this small a batch browns quickly.
- Dripping panThe shallow rimmed pan set under roasting meat, which served as the period's baking sheet; use a shallow rimmed baking sheet. Greased is correct for the period; parchment does the same job with less spread.
- Spacing and yieldDrop by rounded teaspoonfuls about 2 inches apart. Expect roughly two dozen small cookies, done in 8 to 10 minutes.
- If you add the branLet the mixed dough stand 10 minutes before dropping. Bran absorbs liquid slowly, and a batter that looks right immediately will stiffen in the bowl.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour — which is why the measurements are so uneven. Bran had a particular vogue in the early twentieth century, promoted for what was then called "roughage," and drop cookies were one of the ways to work it into something a family would eat. The gap between this recipe's title and its ingredients is a small monument to how these books were made: contributions set in type more or less as they arrived, with the reader expected to supply the judgment the page leaves out.