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Caraway Cookies
2 cups (small) sugar 1 cup butter ½ cup sweet milk 1 egg 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon caraway seed Five Roses flour to make soft dough.
Mix very soft, roll out, sprinkle with sugar on top. Cut in shapes, bake in quick The caraway seed may be left out, substituting with 2 teaspoons vanilla. oven.
A community-contributed rolled cookie of the plainest sort, with almost everything left to the cook's judgement. Two things need pinning down: how much flour, and how hot.
- "Flour to make soft dough"Expect roughly 3½ to 4 cups of all-purpose flour, added a cup at a time until the dough just holds together and is still tacky. Stop early rather than late; the recipe says mix very soft, and that softness is what keeps these tender instead of hard.
- "2 cups (small) sugar"The parenthesis is ambiguous: it may indicate a cup smaller than the modern 8 fluid ounces, or simply fine-grained sugar. If a small cup is meant, something nearer 1½ cups granulated sugar would suit the butter and milk given, but the recipe does not settle it.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that other recipes in the book call for with soda. Whole milk here, since baking powder is doing the leavening.
- A quick ovenUsually read as about 400–425F. For thin rolled cookies 400–425F is enough, and they will be done in 6 to 8 minutes. Watch the edges rather than the clock; at that heat the margin between pale gold and scorched is about a minute.
- Butter and creamingA cup is 8 oz. No salt is called for separately. Creaming the butter with the sugar until light before the egg and milk go in makes the soft dough easier to roll.
- Chill before rollingA deliberately soft dough is difficult to handle at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator, and rolling half at a time on a lightly floured board to about ¼ inch, makes the cutting straightforward.
- The carawayA teaspoon in this much dough is a gentle, aniseed-like background note, not the assertive flavour of a rye loaf. Crushing the seeds lightly or warming them a moment in a dry pan brings more of it out. The vanilla substitution the recipe offers works, but gives a quite different, plainer cookie.
- Sugaring the topsSprinkle after rolling and before cutting, then press the sugar in with the rolling pin so it does not shed onto the sheet and burn.
- YieldAbout 5 to 6 dozen 2-inch cookies. They keep well in a tin for a week.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Canada as advertising for its Five Roses flour, and its contents were compiled from recipes contributed by women who used the brand — which is why the instructions read like notes passed between neighbours rather than tested formulas, and why the flour is named where a modern book would just say "flour." Caraway in sweet baking is a long British inheritance: the seed cake flavoured with caraway was a fixture of nineteenth-century tea tables, and the seed travelled into settler kitchens in Canada both as a flavouring and as a traditional digestive. The recipe's offer of vanilla as an alternative suggests caraway was no longer the automatic choice, though how far taste had shifted is not something this page can show.