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Fruit Snaps
1/2 cup milk. 1 cup butter. 1 teaspoon soda. 1/2 cup molasses. ½ teaspoon soda 1½ cups sugar 1 cup molasses 3 eggs 1 cup raisins 1 cup currants 1 teaspoon cloves 1 teaspoon ginger 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon allspice.
Five Roses to roll soft as can be cut.
These snaps will keep several months when properly made-and safely hidden.
A characteristically terse Five Roses formula: the flour is unmeasured on purpose, and the reader is expected to know what a rolled molasses cooky dough should feel like. A few things need spelling out before you start.
- The flour is deliberately unmeasured"Five Roses to roll soft as can be cut" means work in flour only until the dough will just hold a rolled sheet and take a cutter — roughly 4 to 5 cups for this quantity of liquid, but go by feel. The softer the dough, the tenderer the snap; a stiff dough bakes hard rather than crisp.
- There is no fat in the listThis may well be an omission in the original setting, since a molasses rolled cooky without shortening tends to bake dry and tough; many comparable recipes of the period include something like three-quarters of a cup to a cup of butter, lard or shortening, creamed with the sugar. Either way it is a gap in the text, not something to be resolved by arithmetic.
- Soda and molassesThe teaspoon of soda is there to neutralise the acid in the molasses, which is what makes these rise and darken. Dissolve it in a tablespoon or two of hot water and stir it into the molasses, where it will foam, before combining with the rest.
- Molasses, not blackstrapPeriod molasses means a mild table grade — what is now sold as light or fancy molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and will overwhelm the spices.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small raisin, not fresh red or black currants. Chop them and the raisins if you want a sheet that rolls smoothly; whole fruit tears the dough.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given in the text at all. Bake at about 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and the centres still look slightly soft. They firm as they cool.
- Chill before rollingA dough this soft, with molasses and eggs, is unmanageable warm. An hour in the refrigerator makes it cut cleanly, and rolling between two sheets of paper saves adding extra flour.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly five to six dozen cookies from a two-and-a-half-inch cutter. The claim about keeping several months is plausible for a sugar- and molasses-heavy cooky in a tightly closed tin, though they will gradually soften; a piece of apple in the jar was a common household trick for keeping them pliable.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households in the 1910s, its recipes contributed largely by women who used the company's flour. Molasses snaps of this kind belong to a long North American tradition of hard, spiced, keeping cookies, descended from the ginger and molasses cakes that travelled well before refrigeration and did not depend on butter or fresh milk. The spice quartet here — cloves, ginger, cinnamon, allspice — with dried fruit worked into the dough puts these closer to a fruited hermit than to a plain gingersnap. The closing joke about hiding them is characteristic of the book's tone.