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Lemon Cookies
5 cents worth baking ammonia 5 cents worth oil of lemon 2 cups butter 2½ cups sugar 1 pint sweet milk (warmed) 3 eggs Five Roses flour to make soft dough.
Beat together eggs, sugar and butter.
Add oil of lemon, then baking ammonia dissolved in the warmed milk. Mix to a soft dough with Five Roses flour. Roll thin, and bake as other cookies.
A very large rolled-cookie dough leavened with baker's ammonia rather than baking powder, priced at the counter rather than measured. Two of its ingredients need translating before you can start.
- "5 cents worth"This is a druggist's or grocer's counter measure and has no fixed modern equivalent; what a nickel actually bought is not recorded here. Treat both quantities as unknown and work from modern usage instead.
- Baking ammoniaAmmonium carbonate, also sold as baker's ammonia or hartshorn, still available from baking suppliers and some pharmacies. Current practice is roughly 1 to 1½ teaspoons, finely crushed, per 3 cups of flour. It is not interchangeable spoon-for-spoon with baking powder.
- The hinge: thin and dryBaker's ammonia works only in thin, low-moisture goods, where the ammonia gas escapes completely during baking. "Roll thin" is not a style preference here. Any cookie left thick or underbaked keeps a sharp ammoniated smell and taste in the centre.
- Dissolving itCrush the crystals to powder before they go into the warmed milk, and use the dough reasonably promptly. Undissolved lumps bake into bitter pockets.
- Oil of lemonFood-grade lemon essential oil, several times stronger than lemon extract (commonly reckoned around four times). For a batch this size a scant teaspoon is ample; start with half and adjust in the next batch rather than tasting the raw egg dough. Do not substitute extract volume for volume.
- "Sweet milk"Plain unsoured whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk called for elsewhere in the book. One pint is 2 cups.
- FlourUnspecified by design. Expect somewhere in the range of 9 to 12 cups of all-purpose flour to bring 2 cups butter, 2½ cups sugar, 2 cups milk and 3 eggs to a dough firm enough to roll. Add it in stages and stop while the dough is still soft; chilling makes it manageable.
- OvenNo temperature is given; "bake as other cookies" leaves it to the cook's judgment. For thin rolled cookies modern practice is roughly 375-400F for 6 to 8 minutes, until the edges just colour. Thin cookies at this heat go from pale to scorched in under a minute.
- YieldThis is a store-cupboard quantity, well over eight dozen thin cookies. Halving or quartering it is sensible for a household batch.
Baker's ammonia is the older of the two chemical leaveners in this book, predating baking soda in European baking by a good stretch; it was long obtained by distilling deer antlers, which is why old recipes call it hartshorn. It survived into the twentieth century for exactly the job it does here, in thin crisp rolled cookies and the German and Scandinavian Christmas baking traditions, because it produces no salty residue and leaves the crumb notably dry and snappy. The pricing by nickel is a reminder that these ingredients came from behind a counter in a twist of paper or a corked vial, weighed out by the grocer, not printed with a net weight. Five Roses was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, with mills at Keewatin and on the prairies, and it gathered its recipes from Canadian homemakers who sent them in.