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Cookies Without Eggs or Cream
1 cup sugar 1 cup butter 1 cup water 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda Flavour with nutmeg Five Roses flour to stiffen.
A skeleton formula of the kind that assumed the cook already knew what cooky dough should feel like. The proportions are sound; only the flour is left to judgment.
- "Flour to stiffen"Expect roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups of all-purpose flour, added a half cup at a time until the dough is soft but rollable and no longer sticks to the hands. Stop as soon as it holds together; the water in this dough makes gluten readily and extra flour turns the cookies hard rather than crisp.
- The leavening pairCream of tartar plus soda is a homemade baking powder, and the 2:1 ratio here is the one usually given. It reacts on contact with the liquid, so mix, roll and bake without a long rest; by the usual conversion the 3 teaspoons here correspond to about 4 teaspoons of tinned baking powder, which allows the dough to be handled more leisurely.
- Creaming mattersWith no eggs to carry air, the only lift beyond the soda comes from creaming the butter and sugar thoroughly until pale before the water goes in. Add the water slowly or the mixture will curdle and look broken.
- Butter and saltA cup is 8 oz / 225 g. Butter of the period was often salted; with unsalted butter add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, or the cookies taste flat.
- Nutmeg quantity"Flavour with nutmeg" leaves the amount open; about a teaspoon of freshly grated suits a plain sugar dough, and is more assertive than it sounds. Half that is enough if the nutmeg is pre-ground.
- Rolling and bakingRoll about 1/4 inch thick, cut, and bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just coloured. The centres should still look pale when they come out.
- YieldAbout four to five dozen 2 1/2-inch cookies, depending on how much flour the dough takes.
- StorageNo egg and no cream means these keep well in a tin for a week or more.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, one of the great Canadian flour promotions of the early twentieth century, compiled largely from recipes sent in by women who baked with the brand. That origin may explain the vagueness here: a contributor writing to a milling company could reasonably assume her reader would judge "flour to stiffen" by hand, and the flour quantity was left open-ended. Eggless, creamless cookies of this sort were standard farm and small-town baking long before wartime rationing gave the type its later reputation, eggs were seasonal and cream was worth more churned into butter or sold, while sugar, fat, water and flour were always in the house. Cream of tartar and soda as a two-part leavening predates commercial baking powder and persisted in home recipes well after tinned powder was cheap.