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Fruit Cookies (No. 1)
1 cup raisins 1½ cups brown sugar 1 cup shortening 1 egg (beaten) 4 tablespoons sweet milk 1 teaspoon baking soda Pinch of salt Five Roses flour Nutmeg or mixed spice.
Seed and chop raisins finely, flour and set aside. Beat together sugar and shortening (butter and lard mixed). When creamy, add beaten egg, sweet milk, baking soda, salt, and enough Five Roses flour to make a stiff batter. Add floured raisins with grated nutmeg (or mixed spice) and enough flour to make a stiff dough.
Roll rather thin and bake in quick oven.
A rolled cookie of the plainest sort, written for a cook who knew by feel how much flour a stiff dough wanted. The flour is deliberately unmeasured, so the dough is judged by hand rather than by cup.
- The flour is the whole difficultyNo quantity is given, so you add until the dough rolls without sticking. Expect roughly 3 to 3½ cups of all-purpose; stop when the dough is firm enough to roll thin and still holds together when lifted.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400 to 425F by the usual modern equivalents; the book gives no figure. For thin rolled cookies that is hot but workable: 8 to 10 minutes, and they colour at the edges fast. If your dough is thicker than about ⅛ inch, stay at the lower end for a more even bake.
- ShorteningThe recipe means fat generally, not the hydrogenated tin. It calls for butter and lard mixed without giving proportions; half and half gives a short, slightly savoury cookie, and all butter works and browns more.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh milk, named to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk also in use in kitchens of the period. If you substitute buttermilk the soda balance will shift, since brown sugar already contributes some acidity.
- Baking sodaOne teaspoon is a good deal for this quantity of dough with only brown sugar as acid. Dissolve it in the four tablespoons of milk before adding, or you will get bitter yellow flecks.
- Seeding raisinsMuscat raisins of the period had seeds and had to be cut open. Modern seedless raisins need only chopping. Tossing them in flour before mixing keeps them suspended rather than sinking through the dough.
- Spice"Mixed spice" is the British blend — cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, sometimes clove and coriander. A teaspoon is about right; the recipe gives no quantity.
- YieldAbout four to five dozen cookies at 2 inches, depending on how thin you roll. They keep well in a tin, which is the point of the chapter.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed with sacks of its flour, which the book assumes in unlimited supply, along with a cook who can judge a stiff dough by hand. The "Filling the Cooky Jar" chapter belongs to a household economy in which sweets were made in large batches and stored, not baked to order; raisins, brown sugar and lard were pantry staples that cost little and kept. The word cooky, from Dutch koekje, little cake, was standard North American spelling well into the twentieth century. The instruction to seed the raisins dates the recipe as firmly as anything else in it: commercially seeded and seedless raisins were becoming available in this period, but the practice of splitting them by hand had evidently not disappeared.