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Sugar Snaps
1 cup butter. 2 cups sugar 4 cups Five Roses flour 1 egg 1½ teaspoons baking powder.
VERY time you fold and butter a pastry dough, every time you roll it, you add an extra flake. When the heat expands the cold air between the buttered flakes, each layer puffs and springs in the oven. This is how puff paste is made. Because Five Roses flour has elasticity to spare, you can fold and roll your pastry much thinner without snapping. Because Five Roses resists fat absorption, your pastry is never soggy, nor do the layers stick together-the shortening acts as an impenetrable coating between the flakes. Because Five Roses is ground to a uniform fineness, your pastry puffs evenly in the oven, and you get that even flakiness of texture so much desired-thin as tissue paper. If you really desire crisp, melting pie crust with that nutty flavor peculiar to Manitoba wheat kernels alone, follow the lead of the best pastry makers in Canada. Follow their recipes. Use Five Roses flour.
What survives here is an ingredient list, not a method — the surrounding text is the flour company's advertising copy for puff paste, which has nothing to do with sugar snaps. Read the list as a set of proportions and fill in the technique from experience.
- The list is incompleteTwo cups sugar, four cups flour, one egg and baking powder will not come together as a dough; there is no fat and no liquid. Period sugar snaps of this type call for roughly a cup of butter or lard and a few tablespoons of milk or cream, and the printed page has plainly lost a line or two.
- What a sugar snap isA snap is a stiff dough rolled very thin, cut with a round cutter, sometimes brushed with milk and dusted with sugar, and baked until it colours at the edge. The name describes the texture: it should break cleanly rather than bend.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature. Thin rolled snaps want a fairly quick oven — about 375-400F — for 6 to 8 minutes, and they go from pale to scorched quickly at the rims.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour from Manitoba grain, higher in protein than most modern all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works for snaps; the extra strength the advertisement boasts of is a virtue in bread and puff paste, not in a cookie you want short.
- Baking powder1½ teaspoons to four cups of flour is a very light hand, appropriate to a dough meant to stay flat and crisp rather than rise. Period powders were generally single-acting rather than double-acting, releasing their gas on a different schedule, so there is no reason to increase the quantity.
- RollingRoll thinner than feels right — an eighth of an inch or less — and chill the sheet before cutting if the dough softens. Thickness, more than baking time, decides whether you get a snap or a soft cooky.
- YieldFour cups of flour is a large batch, running to many dozens of thin two-inch rounds. Halve it unless you are genuinely filling a cooky jar.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and like most milling-company cookbooks of the era it was a promotional object first and a kitchen manual second -- which is why a page headed "Sugar Snaps" carries a couple of hundred words on the virtues of Manitoba wheat and none on how to bake the cookies. Recipes were solicited from Canadian users of the flour and interleaved with copy of exactly this kind; how an orphaned ingredient list came to sit above an unrelated passage on puff paste cannot be settled from the page itself. "Snap" for a thin brittle cookie is old English usage, traditionally explained by the sound of the break, and it survives most familiarly in gingersnap.