Home › Filling the Cooky Jar › Maple Sugar Cookies
Maple Sugar Cookies
1 cup sugar 1 cup maple sugar (crushed) 1 cup butter 2 eggs (well beaten) 2 tablespoons water 2 teaspoons baking powder Five Roses flour to make soft dough.
An ingredient list rather than a method, which was normal for a cooky-jar chapter aimed at cooks who already knew the drill. The gaps are the flour quantity, the oven and the shaping.
- Flour, unmeasured"Flour to make soft dough" with this much fat and sugar lands around 3 1/2 to 4 cups of all-purpose. Add it a cup at a time and stop when the dough holds together and pulls cleanly from the bowl; too much flour makes these dry rather than short.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose flour milled from hard spring wheat, so it was slightly stronger than most modern supermarket all-purpose. Plain unbleached all-purpose is the right substitute; bread flour will toughen them.
- Maple sugar, crushedSolid cake maple sugar had to be broken down before it would cream with butter. Buy granulated maple sugar and you can skip the crushing; hard maple candy or a block needs grating or a short spin in a food processor. Maple syrup is not a substitute here, as the liquid will slacken the dough past the point of rolling.
- AssemblyCream the butter with both sugars, beat in the eggs and water, then work in the flour with the baking powder sifted through it. The two tablespoons of water are the only liquid beyond the eggs, and likely help the maple sugar dissolve rather than loosen the mixture into a batter.
- Chill before shapingA cup of butter to a soft dough means it will be sticky at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator lets you roll it about 1/4 inch thick and cut it, or roll it into a log and slice; either suits the recipe as written.
- OvenNo oven or time is given. Around 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges take colour, suits rolled cookies of this size. Maple sugar browns faster than white sugar, so check at the earlier end.
- YieldAbout five dozen 2-inch cookies. They keep a week in a tin and firm up as they cool, which is what the cooky jar was for.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and given away or sold cheaply to promote Five Roses flour; editions circulated widely in Canadian kitchens through the 1910s and 1920s, and much of the content came from recipes submitted by women who used the brand. That origin explains both the terseness here and the maple sugar: in Quebec and eastern Ontario, hard cake sugar from the spring sugaring-off was a pantry staple, cheaper and more available than it is now, and using it half-and-half with white sugar would stretch a distinctly local flavour through a large batch of baking. Recipes of this kind sit in the book beside dozens of other drop and rolled cookies.