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Rocks
1 cup butter. 1½ cups white sugar 3 eggs (yolks) ½ teaspoon ground cloves ¾ teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 pound chopped dates 1 cup broken walnuts (not too fine) 1 teaspoon baking soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon hot water 2¾ cups Five Roses flour.
Cream butter and gradually add and beat in the sugar. Add the beaten yolks.
Mix in other ingredients in order given.
Lastly, add the whites of the three eggs beaten dry. Drop into buttered pans and bake in fairly quick oven.
A drop cookie of the old "rock cake" family, stiff with dates and walnuts. The ingredient list has one clear omission and one vague oven direction, both worth settling before you start.
- The missing butterThe method says to cream butter, but no quantity appears in the list. Other rock-type recipes with 1½ cups sugar and 2 cups flour generally run somewhere between ½ and 1 cup of butter; anything much less will give a dry, crumbly dough. Treat the amount as genuinely unrecorded and judge by the dough.
- "Fairly quick oven"The book gives no temperatures; a quick oven was reckoned somewhere in the 400-450F range, so something around 400F is a reasonable reading. Rocks bake 12-15 minutes, until set and lightly coloured at the edges; the interior should stay soft.
- Baking soda in hot waterDissolving the soda in a tablespoon of hot water is not optional fussiness. It distributes the soda evenly through a heavy dough that would otherwise carry bitter pockets, and it should go in near the end so the rise is not spent before the pans reach the oven.
- Whites beaten dry"Dry" means stiff, past soft peak to the point where the foam looks matte rather than glossy. Fold them in rather than beating; they are the only lift this dough has besides the soda.
- Chopped datesA pound of dates is a large proportion. Use pitted whole dates and chop them yourself, tossing the pieces in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not clump. Pre-chopped sugar-coated dates will make the cookies sweeter than intended.
- Buttered pansButtered pans means flat baking sheets, not muffin tins. Parchment does the job better with a dough this sticky and sugary.
- Shaping and yieldDrop in rough heaps, about a tablespoon each, and leave two inches between them; the ragged surface is the point of the name. Expect roughly four dozen.
"Rocks" was a standard North American name around 1900 for a heaped, unshaped drop cookie, its lumpy surface often said to suggest a small stone, and versions appear under that title, and as "rock cakes," in community and manufacturers' cookbooks of the era. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and its recipes were gathered largely from Canadian housewives, which explains the plain, telegraphic style and the assumption that a cook already knows how much butter goes with three eggs. The heavy load of dates and walnuts marks it as a keeping cookie for the tin, of the kind baked in quantity for Christmas or for shipping in parcels; dried dates, imported and shelf-stable, were by then cheap enough to be a common baking fruit in ordinary households.