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Soft Honey Cakes
1 cup butter 2 cups honey 2 eggs 1 cup sour milk 2 teaspoons soda 1 teaspoon ginger 1 teaspoon cinnamon 4 cups Five Roses flour.
This is a formula rather than a method — the book assumed you knew what to do with a bowl of soft dough. The proportions tell you the rest: with two cups of honey and only four cups of flour, this is a slack, sticky batter that bakes into a soft, cake-like drop cookie, not a rolled and cut one.
- The hinge: don't try to roll itAt this ratio of liquid sweetener to flour the dough will not hold a cut shape. Drop it by rounded spoonfuls onto a lined sheet, or chill it several hours (overnight is better) before handling, since honey doughs firm up considerably when cold.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk from the fridge. Use buttermilk, or stir 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. Its acid is what the soda reacts with.
- Two teaspoons of sodaEnough both to leaven and to neutralise the acid of the sour milk and the honey, and the resulting alkalinity is what browns these cookies deeply. Measure it level and sift it with the flour so no pocket of it survives to leave a soapy patch.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat all-purpose flour, somewhat stronger than most American all-purpose. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose works; mix only until the flour disappears.
- Creaming orderThe recipe gives no method. A conventional approach for a batter like this: cream the butter, beat in the honey, then the eggs, then add the sifted flour, soda and spices alternately with the sour milk, beginning and ending with flour.
- OvenThe recipe as printed gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350°F, suits it. Honey scorches faster than sugar, so watch the bottoms from about 8 minutes; 10 to 12 minutes total is usual for a spoon-sized cookie.
- Yield and keepingRoughly five to six dozen. Honey is hygroscopic, so these get softer and better after a day in a closed tin; a slice of apple in the tin keeps them from drying out.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households as advertising for its flour — a milling-company cookbook of the type that shaped North American home baking in the first decades of the twentieth century. Its recipes were largely contributed by users of the flour, which may explain the telegraphic style here: an ingredient list with no method. The pairing of sour milk and soda is the older leavening of the farm kitchen, predating the commercial availability of baking powder and making use of milk that had turned on its own.