Pin Wheels
If -Selected.
Put 2 teaspoons soda and 4 teaspoons cream tartar into 1 quart Five Roses flour.
Sift twice. Add 2 large tablespoons lard and butter mixed, and enough milk to make a dough easily rolled. Roll about 1 inch thick, spread with a little melted butter, 1 cup of currants, and sprinkle over a little sugar. Roll up into a round loaf, cut into slices about 1 inch thick.
Bake in moderate oven. This recipe, without the currants, makes an excellent biscuit recipe.
A cream-of-tartar biscuit dough rolled with butter, sugar and currants, sliced and baked — an early relative of the cinnamon roll. Two things need adjusting: the leavening is measured for a quart of flour, and "1 inch thick" is thicker than you want for a rolled sheet.
- A quart of flourMeasured dry, 1 quart is about 4 cups, roughly 500 g. The soda and cream of tartar together act as homemade baking powder at about the usual strength for that quantity; if you would rather not mix your own, substitute about 8 teaspoons of baking powder for the soda and cream of tartar.
- Salt is missingThe recipe calls for none, and the dough will taste flat without it. Add about 1 teaspoon of fine salt with the dry ingredients.
- The fat is leanTwo tablespoons of fat to four cups of flour gives a dry, bready biscuit by current standards. For a richer result use 1/2 to 2/3 cup of cold butter, shortening or lard, cut in until the mixture looks like coarse meal.
- How much milk"Enough to make a dough easily rolled" works out to roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups. Add it in stages and stop while the dough is still slightly shaggy — overworked biscuit dough goes tough.
- Roll thinner than toldRoll the dough to a rectangle about 1/2 inch thick before spreading the butter and currants. At a full inch the spiral barely turns and the centre stays doughy. Cut the finished log into 1-inch slices and set them cut-side up, just touching, in a pan.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants — small dried grapes, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Raisins chopped fine are the usual stand-in.
- OvenThe book gives no degrees; a "moderate oven" is conventionally read as about 350F. Biscuit dough rises better at 400-425F, and rolls of this size take 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are browned and the spiral centre is set.
- YieldAbout 16 rolls from a quart of flour. Best eaten the day they are baked; cream-of-tartar biscuits stale quickly.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to sell its flour, and much of it is contributed material. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening is the older method: bakers combined the two themselves, in about a one-to-two ratio, long before commercial baking powder made the step unnecessary, and many cooks went on doing it well into the twentieth century. The "pin wheel" name simply describes the spiral cross-section of the sliced roll, a shape applied in period cookbooks to everything from these currant biscuits to sandwich fillings rolled in bread. Notably, the recipe ends by pointing out that without the fruit it is a plain biscuit — a single dough serving two purposes.