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Buttermilk Cookies
2 eggs 2 cups dark brown sugar 2 lumps butter size of an egg 1 cup buttermilk 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1 teaspoon (level) soda Five Roses flour to stiffen Pinch of salt.
Don't mix too stiff. Roll out and cut into desired shapes. Sprinkle granulated sugar over dough before cutting. Quick oven.
Note-For a change, brush with milk and sprinkle with granulated sugar or stick a large raisin in centre of cooky.
A rolled buttermilk cooky from the era when flour was measured by feel rather than by cup. The two things to settle before you start are how much butter "the size of an egg" means and how much flour "to stiffen" turns out to be.
- Butter, size of an eggOne lump the size of an egg is usually reckoned at about 2 oz (4 tablespoons), so two lumps is roughly 1/2 cup. That is a modest amount of fat for this much sugar and liquid, and the dough will be soft; the recipe itself says only to roll it out.
- "Flour to stiffen"Expect somewhere between 4 and 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour, added a cup at a time until the dough just holds together. The instruction "don't mix too stiff" is the real point: excess flour turns these hard rather than tender, so stop while the dough is still slightly tacky and refrigerate it an hour instead of adding more.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F in period usage. Rolled cookies at that heat are done in about 6 to 8 minutes and go from set to scorched quickly, particularly with dark brown sugar, which browns fast; the lower end of the range gives more margin.
- Cream of tartar and soda togetherThe buttermilk already supplies acid to react with the teaspoon of soda; the cream of tartar adds a second acid that reacts as soon as the dough is moistened. Both are still sold as written. Baking powder is not a straight one-for-one substitute here.
- ButtermilkModern cultured buttermilk is thicker and more sharply acidic than the byproduct of churning that the recipe assumes, but it works here and is the closest thing available. Plain kefir or thinned yogurt behaves similarly.
- Dark brown sugarTwo cups is a lot, and it carries the flavour. Use dark rather than light for the molasses note the recipe assumes; the recipe does not say whether the cups are packed.
- Sugaring before cuttingThe recipe has you sprinkle granulated sugar over the sheet of dough and then cut, so the sugar is on the surface before the shapes are lifted. The milk wash in the note is the more reliable way to make sugar stick.
- YieldAbout five to six dozen cookies at 2 1/2 inches, depending on thickness. Roll to a scant 1/4 inch; thinner gives a crisp cooky, thicker a cakey one.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households that bought its flour, which is why the ingredient list simply says "Five Roses flour to stiffen" — the book existed to sell the sack in the pantry. Recipes in it were largely contributed by ordinary cooks across the country, and the vagueness here is characteristic of that: a cook who judged flour by hand had no reason to measure it. Buttermilk cookies belong to the long tradition of using up the sour liquid left from churning butter, a genuinely valuable ingredient in a farm kitchen and the reason soda and cream of tartar appear so often in North American baking of the period. The suggestion to press a single large raisin into the centre is a small piece of decoration, cheap and available.