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Lemon Biscuits
lb. butter 3 eggs 2 cups white sugar ¼ pint sweet milk 5c. worth baking ammonia (pulverized) 5c. worth oil of lemon 6 cups Five Roses flour.
Cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs well beaten. Sift the ammonia several times in the flour, then add. If not stiff enough, add more flour, as they should be quite stiff, and mix with the hands.
Add the oil of lemon last. Cut in oblong shape about 1 inch thick, and bake in rather hot oven. Will keep a long time.
This recipe makes feathery light, crisp and delicious little biscuits such as are commonly found only at the confectioner's.
A large, old-style contributed recipe with two ingredients measured by what a nickel bought at the drugstore. The proportions of butter, sugar, egg, milk and flour are sound; the leavening and flavouring need judgement.
- The ammonia is the whole pointAmmonium carbonate gives a dry, shattering crispness no baking powder will match, but it must be able to gas off. Roll or cut the dough thinner than the stated inch — half an inch is safer — and bake until genuinely dry through, then cool completely before tasting, as any faint ammonia smell in the kitchen dissipates but a damp centre will hold it.
- "5c. worth" is not a measurementDruggists sold baker's ammonia loose by weight, and the amount a nickel bought is not recoverable. Modern practice for a batch this size (6 cups flour) is on the order of 2 teaspoons of finely crushed baker's ammonia; there is no way to reconstruct the original dose exactly.
- Oil of lemonThis is lemon essential oil, far stronger than modern lemon extract — a nickel's worth was likely a dram or two, but again the quantity is guesswork. Start with about a teaspoon of oil of lemon or a tablespoon of extract, added last as instructed so the volatiles are not beaten out.
- The missing butter quantityThe line reads "lb. butter" with the fraction lost in the original setting. Against 2 cups sugar, 3 eggs, a pint of milk and 6 cups flour, half a pound (2 sticks) gives a dough that handles as described; a full pound would be very rich for a crisp keeping biscuit.
- Sweet milk and a pint"Sweet milk" simply means fresh, unsoured whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk also commonly called for in recipes of the period. If the pint is a US pint, that is 2 cups; an imperial pint, plausible in a Canadian book, is 20 fl oz, nearer 2 1/2 cups.
- Rather hot ovenPeriod oven terms were not standardised, but "rather hot" is generally read as somewhere around 400-425F. The heat matters: a brisk oven drives the ammonia out fast and sets the crust, while a slack oven lets the biscuits spread and hold the smell.
- Sift the leavening properlyBaker's ammonia comes in hard lumps that will leave bitter pockets. Crush it to a powder and sift it through the flour several times, as directed — this is not a step to shortcut.
- Yield and keepingSix cups of flour makes a very large batch — roughly five to six dozen oblongs at half an inch thick. The recipe's own claim is that they "will keep a long time"; humidity, not staling, is what ruins them.
- "Biscuits" means cookiesIn Canadian and British usage of the period these are hard sweet biscuits, not the American soft quick bread. Expect something closer to a shortbread finger or a Scandinavian Christmas biscuit.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses flour, and much of its content came from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the brand — which is why entries like this one carry household shorthand rather than standardised measures. Baker's ammonia was a druggist's item, not a grocer's, and "5c. worth" of it or of oil of lemon reflects a time when the pharmacy counter was a normal stop on the baking errand. Ammonium carbonate long predates baking powder as a chemical leavener and survives mainly in northern European Christmas baking — German Lebkuchen, Scandinavian pepparkakor and their kin — precisely because those biscuits are thin and dry enough for it to work, a limitation the recipe's own construction respects.