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Oatmeal Wafers
1 cup sugar 1 cup butter ½ cup sour milk ¼ teaspoon cinnamon and nutmeg ⅓ cup walnuts (chopped fine) 1 teaspoon soda 4 cups oatmeal 2 cups Five Roses flour.
Roll thin, cut in squares, and bake in quick oven.
A stiff Scottish-style oat dough rolled and cut like shortbread rather than dropped like a cookie. The whole recipe hinges on rolling it genuinely thin and watching it closely in a hot oven.
- Quick ovenThe book gives no temperature; read it as roughly 400-425F. Thin oat wafers colour fast at that heat, so start checking at about five minutes; the edges will darken well before the centres look done.
- Oatmeal means rolled oatsOatmeal -- most likely rolled oats here, though in books of this date "oatmeal" can also mean ground or pinhead oatmeal. Rolled oats are the safer reading; steel-cut will not soften in this dry a dough and the wafers will be gritty.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk in this period was milk left to turn on its own, acidic enough to react with the teaspoon of soda. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or a half cup of milk with about half a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left to stand.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour, close to modern unbleached all-purpose. No substitution needed.
- The spice measure is ambiguous"¼ teaspoon cinnamon and nutmeg" most likely means a quarter teaspoon of each, but it can be read as a quarter teaspoon of the two combined. Either reading gives a very lightly spiced wafer.
- A dry, crumbly doughSix cups of dry ingredients against a cup of butter and half a cup of milk makes a mixture that barely coheres. Work it together thoroughly, then let it rest ten minutes so the oats draw up moisture before rolling; add milk a spoonful at a time only if it will not hold a sheet.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll to about ⅛ inch between sheets of parchment, then cut squares with a knife or pastry wheel and lift them onto the sheet. They spread very little, so they can sit close together.
- YieldThe batch is large by modern standards; several dozen small wafers, depending how thin they are rolled. They keep well in a tin and crisp up as they cool.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal in the 1910s and circulated in enormous numbers as advertising for its flour, which is why the brand name appears inside the ingredient list rather than the pantry. Recipes like this one came in from home cooks across Canada, and the reliance on oatmeal, sour milk and soda points to the Scottish baking tradition that is often said to have been strong in Ontario and the Maritimes: a rolled, cut oat biscuit is much closer to a Scottish oatcake than to the drop cookie that later took over the name. Sour milk appears constantly in books of this period, plausibly because households often had milk that turned before it was used, and pairing its acid with baking soda was the cheapest leavening available.