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Ten-Egg Cookies
10 eggs. 1 pound butter 2 pounds sugar 3 pounds Five Roses flour 1 nutmeg 1 tablespoon soda.
If not stiff enough to roll, add more flour. They should be stiff enough not to run in the pan while baking. These will keep a long time.
A farmhouse batch recipe that assumes you already know the method, and that leaves its title ingredient out of the ingredient list entirely. Read it as a ratio rather than a set of instructions.
- The missing eggsNothing in the text mentions eggs, but the title does: ten of them. No method is given at all, so the order of work is inferred rather than stated; on the standard reading they would be beaten and added after the butter and sugar are creamed. Without that liquid the mass will not come together.
- Scale it downThree pounds of flour is roughly 11 cups, and the finished dough weighs something over seven pounds — several hundred rolled cookies. A quarter batch (4 oz butter, 8 oz sugar, 12 oz flour, 2 to 3 eggs, 3/4 teaspoon soda, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg) is a sane household quantity.
- Weigh, don't measureButter, sugar and flour are all given by weight, which is why the proportions read so cleanly: 1-2-3. Use a scale and the recipe behaves; measure the flour by cup and you will land anywhere within a pound of the target.
- One nutmegA whole nutmeg grated fine is about 2 to 3 teaspoons — the sole flavouring here besides butter. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg of the same volume tastes flat and dusty by comparison.
- The sodaA tablespoon of baking soda across three pounds of flour is a modest amount, but there is no acid in the dough to neutralize it. Expect a faint alkaline tang and a browner cookie, which is part of the character of this style. Substituting baking powder gives a paler, more cake-like result.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Rolled butter cookies of this kind want 350 to 375F, 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges just colour. They are pale and soft coming out and firm as they cool.
- "Stiff enough not to run"This is the hinge. Chill the dough thoroughly before rolling rather than adding flour indefinitely; too much flour makes the cookies dry. Roll about 1/4 inch thick.
- KeepingThey do keep, for the reasons the book takes for granted: high sugar, high fat, low moisture. An airtight tin at room temperature holds them a couple of weeks; they were meant to live in the cooky jar and be eaten from it.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal to sell Five Roses flour, and like most such books it was largely assembled from recipes sent in by customers — which is why the writing is so telescoped. Contributors making a recipe they knew well saw no reason to spell out creaming, beating or baking. Big-batch egg cookies may well belong to the rhythm of a household with poultry: hens lay heavily in spring and early summer, eggs did not keep well, and a ten-egg dough would turn a glut into something that sat in a tin for weeks — though that is background rather than any documented purpose of this recipe.