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Cocoanut Cookies
Cream cup butter and 1 heaping cup sugar. Add 1 well-beaten egg, ½ cup sour milk, 1 level teaspoon soda and 1 teaspoon baking powder. Add gradually 3 cups Five Roses flour and ½ cup shredded cocoanut. Roll thin and sprinkle with sugar. Bake in quick oven. Flavour or not, as desired.
A plain rolled sugar cooky with coconut worked in, from the era when sour milk and soda did the lifting. The dough is soft, so temperature control matters more than anything else here.
- The missing butter measureThe original reads "cream cup butter" with no quantity — most likely a number dropped out in setting the type. Against 1 heaping cup sugar, 1 egg and 3 cups flour, a half cup (4 oz) would be a plausible proportion for a rolled cooky; a full cup makes a much richer, harder-to-roll dough. Neither can be confirmed from the text as printed.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the direct substitute, cup for cup; failing that, half a cup of milk with 1½ teaspoons lemon juice or white vinegar, left to stand ten minutes.
- Soda and baking powder togetherThe soda neutralises the acid in the sour milk and the baking powder supplies the rest of the lift. Keep both. If you substitute sweet milk for the sour, drop the soda or the cookies will taste soapy and brown too fast.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400–450F. For cookies rolled genuinely thin, 425F and 6 to 8 minutes should be enough — at that heat they colour very fast, so watch the first tray and time the rest by it.
- CocoanutShredded coconut of this period was generally sold dried and desiccated, drier than the moist sweetened flake common today, though sweetened kinds were also on the market. Sweetened flake will work but adds noticeable sugar and browns faster; unsweetened desiccated coconut is closer to the original, and chopping it finer keeps the thin dough from tearing when rolled.
- Rolling thinChilling the dough for an hour before rolling makes a soft butter-and-sour-milk dough much easier to handle. Roll on a lightly floured board to about 1/8 inch, sprinkle the sugar on and press it in with a light pass of the pin so it does not fall off in handling.
- The flourFive Roses was a Canadian hard-wheat flour, higher in protein than today's soft all-purpose. Plain all-purpose gives a tenderer cooky; add a little more flour only if the dough is too slack to roll.
- Flavouring and yield"Flavour or not" means a teaspoon of vanilla, lemon extract or a grating of nutmeg, at your discretion. Expect roughly four to five dozen two-inch cookies.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed in connection with the purchase of its flour, often by coupon or for a nominal charge — a promotional cookbook of the kind that dominated North American kitchens in the early twentieth century, with recipes largely contributed by the housewives who used the brand. That origin explains the terseness here: readers were assumed to know what a quick oven felt like and how thin a rolled cooky should be. Sour milk appears constantly in such books because farm and small-town households had it whether they wanted it or not, and pairing it with soda was the cheapest leavening available. Shredded coconut, imported and dried, had by this time long been at home in North American baking, and here it turns up in a plain rolled cooky for the everyday cooky jar.