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Dream Biscuits
1 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1½ teaspoons baking powder 1 tablespoon cream 1 pinch soda in the cream 2 eggs (well-beaten) Five Roses flour to roll.
These biscuits are delicious and dainty Should be cut with a tiny cake cutter.
When baked, should be put togther with icing between and on top of them. Chocolate icing is also very good on top.
A rich rolled sugar cookie, sandwiched in pairs — "biscuit" here is used in the British-Canadian sense of a crisp sweet cookie, not the American quick bread. The recipe gives no flour quantity, no oven temperature and no time, which was normal for 1913 and is the main thing to solve before you start.
- Flour to roll"Flour to roll" means enough to make a dough stiff enough to handle, roughly 3 to 3½ cups for this quantity of butter, sugar and eggs. Add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough holds together without sticking; more flour than that gives a hard, dry biscuit.
- OvenBake at 350–375F. Thin cookies cut with a tiny cutter will be done in 7–10 minutes, and they colour at the edges before the centres look set.
- The pinch of soda in the creamSoda dissolved in a spoonful of cream is a holdover from the era when cream was likely to be slightly soured and would react with it. Modern sweet cream has little acidity to speak of, so the soda contributes very little beyond a trace of browning. The baking powder is doing the real lifting.
- Baking powderPeriod baking powder was often single-acting, releasing its gas on contact with liquid. Modern double-acting powder is more forgiving, but the dough still bakes best when it has been chilled and handled briefly.
- Chill before rollingA full cup of butter to a cup of sugar makes a very soft dough. Refrigerate it at least an hour, roll it about ⅛ inch thick, and work with half at a time keeping the rest cold, or the small rounds will lose their shape.
- CreamThe recipe specifies only "cream"; any dairy cream will serve. The volume is small enough that it matters mostly as the vehicle for the soda.
- IcingA simple confectioners' sugar icing — icing sugar loosened with a little cream or hot water — is what is meant. Sandwich the pairs while the cookies are fully cool, and let the top icing set before stacking.
- YieldYield depends entirely on cutter size and rolled thickness; cut small and thin as directed, this is a very large batch. They keep about a week in a tin, though the icing softens the surfaces after a day or two.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, one of the great Canadian flour millers, and was assembled largely from recipes sent in by women who baked with the brand — which is why so many entries, this one included, read like handwriting copied straight into type, with the flour left to the cook's judgement. Books of this kind were given away or sold cheaply to build brand loyalty, and they became fixtures in Canadian kitchens for decades. The name "dream biscuits" belongs to a whole family of fanciful cookie names popular in early twentieth-century community and promotional cookbooks — dreams, kisses, jumbles, rocks — where the title described the effect rather than the ingredients. The sandwich-with-icing finish, and the alternative of chocolate icing on top, place these squarely in the tea-table tradition, where small, dainty, filled cookies were served to guests rather than eaten out of hand.