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Ginger Puffs (Eggless)
½ cup butter 1½ cups brown sugar ¾ cup treacle 1 teaspoon ginger 1 cup sour milk ½ teaspoon soda 1 cup currants (well washed) Five Roses to make medium stiff batter Bake in patty pans in quick oven.
A brand-book batter cake with no measured flour and no baking time, of the sort that assumed the reader had made a dozen like it. The variables worth pinning down are the flour quantity, the pan and the oven.
- Five Roses is the flourFive Roses was the hard spring wheat flour of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and the book is its advertisement. Use all-purpose flour; a "medium stiff batter" here means one that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours, which is likely to take somewhere in the region of 3 to 3½ cups.
- Treacle means molassesIn Canadian and British usage of the period treacle covered dark syrup generally, and it is almost certainly standing in for molasses here. Use unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity.
- Patty pansSmall shallow tins, closer to a modern mini-muffin or tart tin than a full-size muffin cup. Grease well; molasses and brown sugar catch quickly at the edges.
- Quick ovenPeriod tables put a quick oven at roughly 400-425F, though usage varied. For small molasses cakes, the lower end is safer, since the sugar and treacle brown well before the centre is set.
- No time is givenSmall patty pans at that heat take about 12 to 18 minutes. Test with a straw or skewer in the centre rather than going by colour, which darkens early.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here is naturally clabbered raw milk. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; a cup of milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice, left ten minutes, also works. The half teaspoon of soda looks light for a cup of sour milk plus a full ¾ cup of treacle, and a full teaspoon may give a better rise, though that is a modern adjustment and not what the recipe asks for.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small dried grape, not fresh red or black currants. "Well washed" mattered when dried fruit arrived dusty and stemmed; modern packaged currants need only a light toss in a spoonful of the measured flour to keep them suspended.
- YieldPerhaps two dozen small puffs, fewer in standard muffin cups, though with no flour quantity given this is guesswork. Molasses cakes of this kind generally keep for several days.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and circulated in enormous numbers through Canadian kitchens in the early twentieth century, assembled largely from recipes sent in by women who used the flour. That origin explains the shorthand here: no flour quantity, no baking time, no yield, because the contributor was writing for people who already knew what a medium stiff batter looked like. The "eggless" label in the title is doing real work; eggs were seasonal and dear, and a batter leavened by soda reacting with sour milk and acidic molasses did not need them. Molasses, brown sugar, ginger and currants make up the standard vocabulary of thrift baking across Britain and its settler kitchens, the same family as gingerbread, parkin and the various "war cakes" that later recipe collections would print under that name.