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Honeycomb Drops
1 pound syrup ½ pound brown sugar 4 ounces butter 11 ounces Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons ground ginger (or more to taste) 6 drops oil of lemon.
Drop from spoon on greased pan. Give plenty of room to spread. Bake in moderate oven to golden brown. Syrup made from sugar is best.
This is a lace-thin ginger snap in the brandy-snap family: a loose syrup batter with no egg and no leavening, which spreads on the pan and sets full of bubbles as it cools. Everything depends on dropping it small and giving it room.
- The hinge: spacing and sizeUse no more than a rounded teaspoon per drop and leave 3 to 4 inches between them. With this much syrup and this little flour the batter flows freely, and neighbouring drops will run together into one sheet.
- Weights in cups1 lb syrup is about 1⅓ cups; ½ lb brown sugar is about 1 cup firmly packed; 4 oz butter is one stick or ½ cup; 11 oz flour is roughly 2¼ to 2½ cups depending on how it is measured. Weigh the flour if you can, since the batter's spread depends on it.
- "Syrup made from sugar is best"Most likely a steer toward cane syrup rather than the glucose syrups then made from corn starch. Golden syrup is a close match and gives a pale amber colour; molasses will work but darkens the cookie and fights the ginger.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is usually read as about 350-375F. Watch from 8 minutes on -- these go from golden to burnt very quickly at the thin edges, and the syrup keeps cooking after you pull the pan.
- Oil of lemonA concentrated lemon essential oil sold by druggists. Modern lemon extract is far weaker: on the order of a teaspoon or more in its place, or the finely grated zest of one lemon.
- MixingThe recipe gives no method. Warm the syrup, sugar and butter together until the butter melts, let it cool to lukewarm, then beat in the flour, ginger and lemon.
- Lining and liftingParchment instead of a greased pan saves a great deal of trouble; caramelised syrup welds itself to metal. Let the drops firm on the sheet for a minute or two before moving them, or they will fold.
- YieldDepends entirely on drop size; at a rounded teaspoon each this quantity of batter makes a great many thin cookies. Store airtight the day they are made -- they take up humidity and go leathery within a day or so in a damp kitchen.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal and distributed to Canadian households that bought its flour, which is why the flour is named in the ingredient list and nothing else is. "Honeycomb" here describes the open, bubbled crumb that a heavy syrup batter develops as it spreads and boils on a hot pan, the same effect that gives brandy snaps and lace cookies their look; it is a description of texture, not of any honey in the recipe. Ginger and cane syrup were staples of the North American baking cupboard because both kept well without refrigeration, and syrup-and-ginger drop cookies of this kind were common in period collections. The instruction that syrup made from sugar is best reflects a real distinction of the era, when cane syrup competed on the grocer's shelf with the newer glucose syrups refined from corn starch, and the cane product was often said to be the better flavoured.