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Sandwich Cakes
2 cups white sugar 1 cup butter 1 cup cream 1 egg Five Roses flour to make soft dough 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda Flavour with spice, nutmeg or cinnamon.
Roll out, cut into small cookies and bake. Put two together with icing sugar and peach, quince or any jelly you please. 2 eggs
A rolled sugar cookie sandwiched with jam, from a flour-company book that assumed its readers knew how a soft dough should feel. The proportions are generous and the instructions leave oven, time and quantity entirely to you.
- The egg count is contradictoryThe recipe opens with 1 egg and ends with a stray "2 eggs", possibly a typesetting slip; there is no way to tell which was intended. Two eggs will give a softer, more cake-like cookie in a dough this rich; one will roll more cleanly.
- "Flour to make soft dough"Expect somewhere around 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 cups for this quantity of sugar, butter and cream. Add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds together without sticking to the board; overshooting is what makes these tough.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis pair is homemade baking powder, common before commercial powders were in general use. By the usual conversion (1 teaspoon baking powder to 1/4 teaspoon soda plus 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar) they amount to roughly 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder — and they react as soon as they meet the moist dough, so mix, roll and bake without long delays.
- "Cream" means heavy cream"Cream" -- Turn-of-the-century household cream varied widely, roughly 18 to 35 percent fat depending on how it was separated, so it is not necessarily today's heavy cream. Table or whipping cream is the safer substitution rather than half-and-half, or the dough will need noticeably more flour.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because the cook judged her own range. Bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just coloured. These are thin cookies and go from pale to hard quickly.
- Rolling thicknessRoll to about 1/8 inch. Anything thicker gives a sandwich too tall to bite through cleanly once filled, and the pair is meant to be small.
- The filling"Icing sugar and jelly" points to a firm fruit jelly between the halves together with icing sugar; whether the sugar was dusted over the top or worked into the filling the recipe does not say. A stiff jelly rather than a loose jam helps keep the halves from sliding apart.
- YieldWith 2 cups of sugar and a cup of butter this is a very large batch, well beyond a few dozen finished sandwiches; the exact count depends on how much flour goes in and how thin the dough is rolled. Halving it is sensible for a modern household.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal in the 1910s and assembled largely from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour — which is why the entries vary so much in precision, and why "flour to make soft dough" was thought a sufficient instruction. Sandwich cakes of this kind belong to the older tradition of rolled sugar biscuits paired with preserves, close cousins to the Scottish and English jam sandwich biscuit; the suggestion of peach or quince jelly points to a kitchen that still put up its own fruit, quince in particular being valued for setting firm enough to hold between two layers. The cream of tartar and soda leavening rather than a tin of baking powder is another marker of the period: both were sold separately in grocers' shops.