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Nugget Cakes
1 cup brown sugar ½ cup butter and lard mixed 2 eggs 3 cups wheat flakes or rolled oats 1 cup (large) Five Roses flour 1 cup chopped nuts 1 teaspoon soda 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Drop in tiny balls on pan, and bake in quick oven. 1 cup butter
A plain oat-and-nut drop cookie of the sort Canadian mill cookbooks printed by the dozen. The ingredient list has an obvious typesetting fault at the end that needs settling before you start.
- The stray "1 cup butter"The line at the end contradicts the half cup of butter and lard already listed at the top, and looks like a stray line, possibly carried over from a neighbouring recipe. Use the half cup of mixed fat; a full cup on top of it would give a batter that spreads into one sheet.
- Butter and lard mixedHalf and half by volume, so about 4 tablespoons of each. All butter works and tastes better; all shortening gives a slightly puffier cookie. Cream it with the sugar before the eggs go in — the recipe assumes you know this and does not say so.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda to two of cream of tartar is home-made baking powder. If you would rather use commercial powder, omit both and use about 3 to 4 teaspoons of it, since apart from the molasses in the brown sugar there is little acid here for the soda to work against on its own.
- Wheat flakesThe rolled, flattened wheat berry sold for porridge, still available as rolled wheat in bulk shops. Old-fashioned rolled oats are the stated alternative and are the easier buy; do not use quick oats, which turn the crumb pasty.
- A "large" cup of flourA generously filled cup rather than one levelled off — call it roughly 5 oz / 140 g. The wording suggests a full cup with a slight heap rather than a modern levelled cup, though the book does not spell its measure out here.
- Quick ovenUsually reckoned at about 400–425F in period usage, which is hot for a sugar-and-butter cookie. Bake at 400F for 8–10 minutes and watch the edges; at the higher end the bottoms colour before the centres set.
- No salt, no liquidNeither appears, which is normal for recipes written when the fat was salted lard or salt butter. Add ¼ teaspoon salt if your butter is unsalted. The dough will look dry and crumbly; press each ball together firmly rather than adding liquid.
- Size and yield"Tiny balls" means walnut-sized at most — the nugget of the name. Expect about three and a half to four dozen, and space them well since they spread moderately.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, with offices in Montreal and Winnipeg, and given away or sold cheaply to promote Five Roses flour; editions from the 1910s onward reached a very large number of Canadian kitchens, and much of the content was contributed by users of the flour, with contributors sometimes named beside the recipes. The recipes were set in narrow columns from submitted material, which may be how a line like the trailing "1 cup butter" survived into print. Cookies built on rolled oats or rolled wheat were a thrifty way to stretch a modest amount of butter and sugar across a large batch, and the soda-plus-cream-of-tartar leavening reflects a period when households still mixed their own baking powder as well as buying it by the tin.