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Honey Mixture
½ pound walnut meats (chopped finely) ¼ pound seeded raisins (cut finely) 1 cup honey.
Three ingredients and no method, which was normal for a filling entry in a flour-company book: the cook was expected to know it was stirred together and spread. It belongs with the rolled sweet breads and tea rings in the same section.
- Weights to volumesHalf a pound of shelled walnuts is about 2 cups chopped; a quarter pound of raisins is a scant ¾ cup. With a cup of honey that comes to something over 3 cups of filling, probably enough for two rolled loaves or a large tea ring.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" meant large muscats that had their seeds picked out, not the seedless sultanas we buy. Ordinary dark or golden raisins work; chop them so the filling spreads instead of tearing the dough.
- ConsistencyA cup of honey to two cups of nuts gives a fairly loose paste that can run out of a rolled loaf. Chill it before spreading, or hold back a few tablespoons of honey, and leave a clear border of dough at the seam edge.
- Honey and heatHoney browns faster than sugar. The entry gives no baking directions; if you are using this in a filled bread, a moderate oven of around 350F rather than 400F-plus, with a foil tent for the last ten minutes if the top is colouring hard, is the safer course.
- Toasting the nutsNot in the original, but 8 minutes at 350F before chopping makes a considerable difference to walnuts that have been sitting in a bag.
- KeepingHoney and dried fruit are both self-preserving; the mixture holds a couple of weeks covered in the refrigerator. Let it come back to room temperature before spreading or it will drag the dough.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and was given away or sold cheaply to Canadian households buying Five Roses flour — one of the most widely distributed cookbooks in the country in the early twentieth century. Fillings like this one were printed as bare ingredient lists, on the assumption that the reader already had the dough recipe to hand. Honey here is doing the work sugar does elsewhere in the book, and walnut-and-honey fillings for rolled and braided breads have long precedents in central and eastern European baking.