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Honey Cookies
2 eggs. 1 cup sugar 1 cup honey 1 teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon ginger 1 tablespoon cinnamon Five Roses flour to roll.
This is a working cook's shorthand rather than a full recipe — the flour is left entirely to judgement and no fat, egg or liquid is named. Treat the four listed quantities as fixed and build the dough around them.
- "Flour to roll"You add flour until the dough is stiff enough to roll without sticking, which with 1 cup sugar and 1 cup honey lands somewhere around 4 to 4½ cups. The original genuinely does not specify, so work in flour a half-cup at a time and stop when a pinch of dough holds its shape.
- Soda, not baking powder"Soda" here is bicarbonate of soda (baking soda). It is doing real work: honey is acidic, and the soda both neutralises it and gives the lift and the faint caramel-brown colour these cookies are meant to have. Dissolve it in a spoonful of hot water or sift it with the first addition of flour so it does not streak.
- Warm the honey and sugarThe sugar will not dissolve into cold honey. Heat the two together gently until the sugar is no longer gritty, then cool to lukewarm before the soda and flour go in, or the soda will spend itself early.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour of the period, milled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. It was a comparatively strong flour, stronger than most modern all-purpose, though all-purpose will substitute here; handle the dough lightly once the flour is in.
- The spicing is not a misprintA tablespoon each of ginger and cinnamon in a single batch reads as a lot by current habit, but this is a honey-spice cooky of the sort that sits near the lebkuchen tradition, and the spice is the point.
- Fat and bindingNothing in the list holds the dough together but the honey and sugar, which gives a hard, snapping cooky that keeps well. If you want a tenderer result, ½ cup butter or shortening creamed into the warm honey mixture will do it, though the original names no fat.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. Rolled thin, about ⅛ inch, a moderate oven of roughly 350°F for 8 to 10 minutes suits it, until set and just darkening at the edges. Honey doughs scorch quickly, so watch the last minutes.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly five to six dozen small rolled cookies. They bake hard and soften over several days in a tin, which is exactly what a cooky jar recipe is for; a slice of apple or bread in the tin speeds it along.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and assembled largely from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour — which explains the telegraphic style here, with quantities given only where the writer thought a stranger could not guess. Honey cookies of this type descend from the European honey-and-spice cake tradition (German Lebkuchen, Dutch taai-taai) in which honey serves as sweetener and preservative, and they were valued precisely because they kept: a stiff, low-fat, heavily spiced dough goes stale slowly and softens rather than crumbles. Baking soda had been a kitchen staple in North America since the mid-nineteenth century, and its pairing with honey or molasses is often said to be the signature of the hard rolled spice cookies thought to have filled farmhouse jars before the First World War.