Home › Filling the Cooky Jar › Peanut Cookies
Peanut Cookies
1 cup peanuts (chopped not too fine) 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup sugar 3 eggs 2 tablespoons milk ¼ teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder Five Roses flour to roll.
Note-This will also make almond or walnut cookies by changing the nuts. 10 eggs
A rolled cooky with almost no fat and a great deal of egg, written in the shorthand a 1915 cook could fill in from experience. Two things are missing outright: the flour quantity and the oven.
- "Flour to roll"The original leaves this to judgment. With 3 eggs, 1 cup sugar and 2 tablespoons milk you will need roughly 2½ to 3 cups of all-purpose flour to get a dough stiff enough to roll — add it a half cup at a time and stop as soon as the dough leaves the side of the bowl.
- The stray "10 eggs"This trailing figure does not belong to the recipe as written; the ingredient list already calls for 3 eggs. Its origin is unclear, most likely stray text from the page, and it should be ignored.
- OvenThe recipe as printed gives no baking direction at all. As a modern starting point, bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges take colour; the low butter content means they dry out quickly past that.
- Chill before rollingAn egg-rich, low-fat dough is slack and sticky when freshly mixed. An hour in the refrigerator makes it roll to ¼ inch without flooding the board with extra flour, which would toughen the cooky.
- The peanutsThe recipe specifies only "peanuts (chopped not too fine)". Use roasted unsalted and keep the chop coarse as directed — finely ground peanuts release oil and turn the dough greasy.
- ButterTwo tablespoons for a batch this size is genuinely lean by modern standards; expect a crisp, dry, biscuit-like cooky rather than a tender one.
- YieldAbout 4 dozen at 2 inches, depending on how much flour the dough takes.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and distributed cheaply to promote its flour — one of the most widely circulated cookbooks in Canadian kitchens in the early twentieth century. A batch of hard, keeping cookies baked at once and drawn on over time suits the scant butter and the reliance on eggs for richness here. Peanuts were by then cheap and widely available in North America, and cookbooks of the period use them in cakes, candies and cookies much as they use walnuts. The note that almonds or walnuts may be substituted is characteristic of these promotional books: one formula, several names, and the flour brand constant throughout.