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Lemon Snaps
Juice of 2 lemons and grated rind of 1 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter 1 egg 3 teaspoons milk ½ teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar Five Roses flour to make rather stiff.
Roll out thin and cut. Bake in fairly hot oven.
A plain rolled sugar cooky sharpened with lemon, from an era when a cook was trusted to judge the flour by feel. A few things need translating.
- The flour is up to you"Flour to make rather stiff" is the whole measurement given. Expect somewhere between 3 and 3½ cups of all-purpose; add it in stages until the dough holds together and is firm enough to roll without tearing, then chill it before rolling.
- The stray line at the endThe "1 cup butter" printed after the instructions appears to be a printing error or a fragment of an adjoining recipe. The recipe's own butter quantity is the ½ cup listed with the other ingredients.
- Soda plus cream of tartarThis pair is homemade baking powder — ½ teaspoon soda to 1 teaspoon cream of tartar is the standard ratio. If substituting, 1½ teaspoons of commercial double-acting baking powder is close, though the soda also has the lemon juice to react with, so keep the soda if you can.
- Lemon juice and milkTwo lemons yield roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons of juice, which is a good deal of liquid for this quantity of butter and sugar; the dough will need the higher end of the flour range. The three teaspoons of milk may curdle slightly on contact with the acid, which is harmless.
- "Fairly hot oven"The book gives no temperature; roughly 375-400F by the usual modern equivalences. Thin snaps at that heat need only 6 to 8 minutes, and they colour fast at the edges — watch the first tray and adjust.
- Roll thin means thinAn eighth of an inch or less. "Snap" in cooky names is generally associated with crispness; a thick round will bake soft and stay soft.
- YieldAround five dozen 2-inch rounds, depending on how thin you roll and how much flour the dough took.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional volume for its Five Roses flour, and was compiled in large part from recipes contributed by Canadian home cooks — which may account for the confident vagueness of "flour to make rather stiff." Lemon snaps belong to the large family of rolled sugar cookies: cheap, keepable, and made from staples a household had on hand. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening is a nineteenth-century holdover from the period before premixed commercial baking powder, and it survived in printed recipes well after commercial powders were widely available.