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Tea Kisses
Sift together 2 cups Five Roses flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder,½ teaspoon salt Then rub in½ cup butter, 1 cup white sugar, 2 eggs, scant ⅓ cup of sweet milk and 1 teaspoon lemon flavouring. Drop on buttered tin. Sprinkle with granulated sugar, and bake in hot oven.
A plain drop cookie from the era when a bag of flour came with a cookbook attached. The method is compressed almost to the point of being cryptic, but the proportions are sound and the dough behaves like any stiff drop-cookie batter.
- Read "rub in" looselyThe instruction lumps butter, sugar, eggs, milk and flavouring into one sentence, but rubbing butter into flour the way you would for pastry will give a crumbly, short cookie. Standard practice for this style is to cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then alternate the dry mixture with the milk.
- Hot ovenIn period usage that meant roughly 400-450F. Small cookies at that heat need close watching — 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges just colour. If yours spread thin, drop to 400F.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because buttermilk and sour milk were common in kitchens and would have reacted differently with the leavening. Ordinary whole milk is the equivalent.
- Scant ⅓ cup"scant" means fill just under the line — call it 5 tablespoons. The dough should mound on the spoon rather than pour; add the milk gradually and stop when it holds its shape.
- Lemon flavouringLemon extract, then sold in small bottles alongside vanilla and almond. A teaspoon of modern extract is strong; the zest of one lemon gives a rounder flavour if you prefer it.
- Buttered tinA flat baking sheet, greased. Parchment does the job better and prevents the sugar sprinkled on top from welding the cookies down.
- YieldRoughly three dozen cookies from teaspoon-sized drops, spaced two inches apart — they spread.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, one of a genre of flour-brand cookbooks that put a company's name into hundreds of thousands of Canadian kitchens in the early twentieth century. Recipes name the brand by way of advertising, and the collections drew heavily on contributions from home cooks across the country, which explains the telegraphic style — these were written by people who already knew how to make a cookie and needed only the proportions. "Kisses" seems to have been a loose nineteenth-century term for any small, sweet, drop-sized confection, most often meringues but apparently applied freely to plain sugar-topped cookies like this one; the name promises little more than that the thing is small and eaten in one bite.