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Oatmeal Crackers
4 cups oatmeal 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon soda 1 cup shortening Sour milk to roll out.
This is a recipe in the older telegraphic style: a list of proportions and the assumption that the cook knows what to do with them. The gaps worth filling are the liquid, the thickness, and the oven.
- What the flour wasFive Roses was a Canadian hard-wheat flour milled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. Plain all-purpose flour works here; the dough is stiff and short, and gluten strength is not doing much work.
- Oatmeal means rolled oatsIn Canadian recipes of this period 'oatmeal' usually indicates rolled oats rather than cooked porridge or steel-cut groats, though in Scottish usage the word more often meant ground meal. Old-fashioned rolled oats give the right texture; quick oats make a sandier, more uniform cracker.
- Sour milk and sodaThe teaspoon of soda needs the acid in genuine soured milk to lift and to avoid a soapy aftertaste. Use buttermilk, or milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes. The recipe gives no quantity: add it a little at a time until the dough just holds together and will roll.
- ShorteningA cup is a generous amount for 6 cups of dry matter, which is why these are crisp rather than bready. Lard was one common choice; butter or vegetable shortening both work, rubbed into the dry ingredients as for pastry.
- Roll thinThis is the hinge. Crackers rolled 1/8 inch or less bake crisp all the way through; anything thicker stays soft in the middle and reads as a flat cookie. Roll on an oat-dusted surface and cut into squares or rounds, pricking each with a fork.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F for 10 to 14 minutes, until the edges are brown and the centres dry. They firm as they cool, so pull them before they darken overall.
- Yield and keepingThe quantity is large by modern standards -- several dozen thin 2-inch crackers. Cooled completely, they keep well in a tin; halve the recipe if that is more than you want.
- SweetnessA cup of sugar puts these between a cracker and a sweet biscuit. Cut the sugar to 1/3 cup if you want something to carry cheese.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its Five Roses brand flour, and it collected recipes contributed by housewives across the country -- which may explain the compressed, note-to-self style of entries like this one. Oat crackers of this kind are often linked to the Scottish oatcake tradition carried into Canada by settlers, though the sugar and the chemically leavened sour-milk dough mark this as a North American form rather than the plain baked meal of the girdle. The reliance on soured milk was practical as much as culinary: in households without reliable refrigeration, milk on the turn had a known use, and soured milk with baking soda was a common quick-leavening of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.