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Nut Buns
2 cups Five Roses flour ½ cup butter ¾ cup white sugar ½ cup chopped nuts 1 egg Pinch of salt 1½ teaspoons baking powder Little milk.
Cream the butter and sugar in a basin, then add the well-beaten egg, then the nuts. Mix the baking powder well into the flour with the salt. Put the milk into the basin and stir well, then last the flour folded in. Have baking tins ready and drop the mixture on in teaspoonfuls, allowing enough room to rise. Bake about 15 minutes. Put a nut on top of each bun before putting in oven.
These are drop cookies in all but name — the dough is a creamed butter batter stiffened with flour, not a yeasted bun. Two things the original leaves out: the oven temperature and how much milk.
- "Little milk"Genuinely ambiguous, and the amount decides the result. Add it a tablespoon at a time until the batter drops reluctantly from a teaspoon and holds its shape; 2 to 3 tablespoons is usually enough with 2 cups of flour. Too much and they spread into thin wafers.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which was normal when cooks judged by hand and flour scorch. For a small drop batter of this richness, 375F for 12 to 15 minutes gives set edges and a pale centre.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose hard-wheat flour from the period. Modern all-purpose works directly; measure by spooning into the cup and levelling, since a packed cup can add something like 15 to 20 percent more flour than a lightly filled one.
- Order of mixingThe instruction to add the milk before the flour is unusual, and worth following: loosening the creamed butter first should let the flour be folded in with very little working, which tends to keep the crumb short rather than tough.
- The nutsUnspecified. Walnuts or hazelnuts suit the sugar level; use the same kind for the whole nut pressed on top before baking.
- Yield and pansTeaspoonfuls give roughly 40 small buns; a larger spoonful gives proportionately fewer and needs a few minutes longer. The original says only to have the tins ready, without specifying greasing; line them, as this batter's sugar content sticks.
- StorageCool completely before stacking. They keep four or five days in a tin and firm up as they sit, which is when the nut flavour comes forward.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose imprint on the book is Montreal. It was assembled largely from recipes sent in by women who used the brand — which may explain the loose hand of instructions like "little milk" and the missing oven temperature. Baking-powder mixtures of this kind were a comparatively recent option for home bakers, chemical leavening having become widely available only in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the appeal was speed, since a batch could be mixed and baked without waiting on a rise. Nuts such as walnuts and almonds were generally bought rather than grown in Canadian kitchens of the period.