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Brown Betties
1 cup sugar 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 egg 2 tablespoons butter ½ teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar ½ teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons milk ½ cup chopped nuts ¼ 1/2 cup chopped raisins
Drop from a teaspoon and bake in quick oven.
A drop cookie in the plainest style of the period: the method is left almost entirely to the cook, so the notes below fill in what the original assumes you already know.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, then the milk, then the dry ingredients sifted together, and finally the nuts and raisins. The order matters more than usual here because there is so little liquid to work with.
- "Quick oven"Period sources place a quick oven at roughly 400-425F. For small drop cookies on a modern sheet, 400-425F for 8 to 10 minutes gives the browned edge intended without scorching the raisins.
- Soda and cream of tartarHalf a teaspoon of soda with a teaspoon of cream of tartar is the familiar 1:2 home-mixed baking powder. Roughly 2 teaspoons of commercial baking powder is the usual equivalent, though the cream-of-tartar pairing is single-acting and reacts as soon as it is wetted.
- The dough is very stiffTwo cups of flour against two tablespoons of butter and four tablespoons of milk makes a dough closer to a paste than a batter. It should just drop from a teaspoon; if it will not, add milk a teaspoon at a time rather than reworking the proportions.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat all-purpose flour, thirstier than modern soft-wheat brands. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose is the closest match; with a low-protein flour you may need slightly less milk.
- Butter and saltTwo tablespoons is a lean amount by current standards and the cookies are likely to bake dry and crisp rather than soft. If you are using salted butter, reduce the added salt.
- YieldTeaspoon-sized drops spaced about two inches apart give several dozen small cookies. They spread little.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its Five Roses brand flour, and it was compiled largely from recipes contributed by home cooks across Canada -- which is why the instructions are so telegraphic, written by people for whom "drop from a teaspoon and bake in quick oven" was a complete description. The name here has no clear connection to the apple-and-breadcrumb pudding called a brown Betty; the origin of "Betty" as a name for baked goods is not documented. Cream of tartar paired with soda, as here, is the older leavening system that commercial baking powder replaced.