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Sweet Crackers
3 cups sugar 1 cup lard 1 cup sweet milk 2 eggs 2 ounces baking ammonia Five Roses flour to make stiff dough Pinch of salt.
Dissolve ammonia in 1 cup hot water and add salt. Use lemon flavour to taste. Mix stiff with Five Roses flour.
Roll thin and bake in hot oven.
D ON'T risk disappointing the children. Always use FIVE ROSES flour for small cakes of all kinds. Packed in barrels or bags-the same good flour.
A big, plain rolled cookie leavened with baker's ammonia rather than baking powder — the classic hard, snapping "cracker" texture depends entirely on that. A few things need translating before you start.
- Baking ammonia is the hingeAmmonium carbonate (hartshorn, baker's ammonia) works only if the dough is rolled thin and baked dry, so the gas escapes completely. In a thick or underbaked cookie it stays behind and the result smells and tastes of ammonia. Roll thin means thin — about 1/8 inch.
- Expect the smellThe oven will give off a sharp ammonia odour during baking. That is normal and it dissipates as the crackers cool; run the hood or open a window. Cool them fully before tasting or storing.
- Two ounces is by weightAbout 55-57 g of ammonium carbonate. The recipe never states a flour quantity ('Five Roses flour to make stiff dough'), but with 3 cups of sugar plus milk, two eggs and a cup of hot water this is a very large batch by household standards. Baker's ammonia is sold in small tins today; scaling the whole recipe down by a third or a quarter is sensible unless you want a very large number of crackers.
- A hot ovenIn period terms roughly 400-450F. These are thin and bake fast; watch for pale gold at the edges rather than colour across the whole cracker.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that recipes of the period often called for. No substitution needed.
- LardOne cup of lard gives the short, crisp bite; the recipe says only 'lard' and does not specify a grade. Modern shortening works; butter will brown faster and soften the snap.
- Lemon flavourLemon extract, a teaspoon or two. Grated zest also works but adds moisture and will not keep as long.
- "Flour to make stiff dough"Add flour until the dough is firm enough to roll without sticking and no further — overworking a dough this sweet makes the crackers tough rather than crisp. Chilling it half an hour makes thin rolling much easier.
- StoringBaker's ammonia cookies keep exceptionally well. Cooled completely and kept in a tin, they stay crisp for weeks, which is much of the reason the leavener stayed in use.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and was distributed to Canadian households who bought its flour in the early twentieth century — hence the advertising copy running straight into the recipe text. Baking ammonia, once made by dry-distilling deer antler and still sometimes called hartshorn, was a standard leavener for hard, thin biscuits before baking powder became cheap and reliable; it produces gas that leaves no residual salty or metallic taste, which is one reason bakers kept using it for keeping-cookies such as the German springerle and the Dutch speculaas. A batch this size, yielding a great many crackers to be stored in a tin, suits a household buying flour by the barrel — as the advertisement itself assumes.