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Favorite Cookies
2 cups sugar 1 cup (heaping) butter 2 eggs (well beaten) Nutmeg or other flavouring 1 cup sweet milk 3 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons (rounded) baking powder.
Cream together in a large bowl sugar and butter. Add the eggs well-beaten.
Grate in a little nutmeg or use any other flavouring preferred. Gradually pour in the sweet milk and Five Roses flour which has been sifted 3 times with the baking powder. Roll out quite thin and use a small cutter (I could not get a small enough cutter and punched some holes in the bottom of a very small baking-powder can). Bake in rather quick oven, and let the cookies get cold and hard before putting away. These will keep good and remain crisp almost indefinitely, and therefore are good to make up in large batches.
Note-Above recipe makes splendid lemon cookies by the simple addition of the rind and juice of 1 lemon, omitting all other flavouring.
A plain rolled sugar cooky from a flour-company collection, written when a cook was expected to judge dough by feel. The one thing to watch is the flour: as printed, the dough will not roll.
- The dough will be too soft as writtenTwo cups sugar, a heaping cup butter, two eggs and a cup of milk against only three cups flour gives a batter, not a rollable dough. Expect to work in another 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 cups flour until the dough is stiff enough to roll thin, and chill it an hour before rolling.
- "Sweet milk"Plain whole milk, as distinct from the soured milk or buttermilk used in recipes leavened with saleratus. No substitution needed.
- Heaping and rounded measuresA heaping cup of butter is roughly 9 to 10 oz, so about 2 1/4 sticks. Two rounded teaspoons baking powder means a generous 2 teaspoons; 2 1/2 level teaspoons is close enough.
- "Rather quick oven"A fairly hot oven, roughly 375 to 400F. Thin cookies at that heat bake in only a few minutes and go from pale to burnt quickly at the edges, so watch the first tray and set your time from it.
- Sifting three timesThis was for aerating coarse, unevenly milled flour and distributing the baking powder. With modern flour one sifting, or a thorough whisk, does the same job.
- The baking-powder can cutterThe holes punched in the closed end were presumably to let air in so the dough would release. A 1 1/2 inch round cutter, or the floured rim of a small glass, does the same. Roll to about 1/8 inch for the crisp texture the recipe promises.
- Cooling and storageLetting them go cold and hard on a rack before tinning is the point of the recipe: any residual warmth turns to steam in a closed container and softens them. They keep for weeks in a tight tin, though not "indefinitely."
- YieldNot given. It is a large batch of very small, thin cookies, which is why the original recommends making it up in quantity.
- The lemon variationRind and juice of one lemon adds noticeable liquid; account for it when you judge how much extra flour the dough needs.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to Canadian households that bought its flour, and much of it was assembled from recipes sent in by customers. That origin shows here: the parenthetical aside about not owning a small enough cutter, and the improvised baking-powder tin, are a home cook's voice rather than an editor's, left in the copy as it came. Cookies of this kind, sugar and butter creamed together, milk and flour worked in, rolled thin and cut, were the standard stocking of the cooky jar; they were made in enormous batches precisely because they kept crisp, which mattered in a house without much refrigeration and with a stove that was only worth heating for a full day's baking.