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Hickory Nut Cookies
½ cup butter ½ cup sugar ½ cup milk 3 eggs (well beaten) 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 cup hickory nuts (chopped) Five Roses flour to roll thin Quick oven. 2 eggs
A terse turn-of-the-century cooky recipe of the sort that assumed the cook already knew what a rolled dough should feel like. Two things need settling before you start: how much flour, and what the stray "2 eggs" at the end is doing there.
- The flour is up to you"Flour to roll thin" means you add until the dough stops sticking and will take a rolling pin. With a half cup each of butter, sugar and milk plus three eggs, expect somewhere in the range of 3 to 4 cups of all-purpose flour. Add it in stages and stop while the dough is still soft.
- Chill before rollingThis is the hinge. A dough this wet is unrollable straight from the bowl, and the temptation is to keep adding flour until the cookies turn tough and dry. An hour in the refrigerator does the work that another cup of flour would ruin.
- The trailing "2 eggs"The line makes no sense as written and is almost certainly a compositor's error or a fragment of an adjacent recipe. Use the three well-beaten eggs listed in the ingredients and ignore it.
- Quick ovenA quick oven is usually reckoned at roughly 400 to 425F. That is right for thin rolled cookies, which set in the time it takes them to colour, but they will go from pale to burnt in under a minute. Figure 5 to 8 minutes and watch the second tray as closely as the first.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat flour milled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose cookbook this is. Modern all-purpose flour works; bread flour will make the cookies noticeably tougher.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory nuts are a wild-gathered nut, still sold by some specialty growers but rarely in supermarkets, and notoriously hard to shell. Pecans are the same genus and the closest substitute in flavour and fat content; walnuts are sharper but acceptable.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon against roughly three and a half cups of flour is a very light hand by modern standards, but these are meant to be thin and crisp rather than puffed. Leave it as written.
- YieldNone is given. Rolled thin and cut at about 2 inches, expect five to six dozen.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households, its recipes contributed largely by the women who baked with the flour. That origin shows here: the instructions assume a cook who needs quantities, not method, and the oven direction is a single word. Hickory nuts place the recipe in the eastern hardwood country of Ontario, Quebec and the American Great Lakes, where shagbark hickories grow wild and the nuts were gathered in autumn rather than bought. Cracking them was traditionally winter fireside work, since the shells are thick and the kernels sit in convoluted chambers, which is much of the reason the nut never became a commercial crop the way its cousin the pecan did.