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Unleavened Bread
To 3 cups of Five Roses flour add 1 teaspoon salt. Mix into a stiff dough with milk or water. Roll out thin, and cut into rounds with a biscuit cutter. Roll these out again until they are not much thicker than paper. Bake quickly in floured pan. -Mrs. A. W. Fraser, Iron Springs, Alta.
A three-ingredient cracker bread that depends almost entirely on how thin you roll it and how hot the pan is. Everything else is forgiving.
- The hinge: roll it to paperThe dough is rolled twice: once for the whole sheet, again after each round is cut. The recipe is explicit that the second rolling should take them to "not much thicker than paper"; anything appreciably thicker bakes into a hard biscuit rather than a crisp wafer.
- "Bake quickly"No temperature is given anywhere in the instruction; in modern terms a hot oven, somewhere around 425-450F, is a reasonable reading. At this thickness the rounds should need only a few minutes; watch for blistering and pale brown edges and pull them before the centres colour.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. Modern all-purpose flour works directly; bread flour gives a slightly tougher, snappier cracker.
- Liquid quantity is not givenExpect roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of milk or water for 3 cups flour, added gradually. The dough should be stiff and barely tacky — a wet dough will not roll thin without sticking.
- "Floured pan"A bare baking sheet dusted with flour, not greased. Flour rather than fat keeps the surface dry so the wafers crisp instead of frying at the contact point.
- DockingPrick each round with a fork before baking if you want them flat. Unpricked wafers puff into hollow pockets in a hot oven, which is fine but makes them fragile.
- Yield and keepingAbout three to four dozen rounds from a 3-inch cutter. Cool completely on a rack and store airtight; any trapped steam softens them within hours, though a few minutes back in a hot oven restores the snap.
Unleavened bread of this kind sits in the older tradition of hearth breads made without yeast or chemical leaven — closer to a Scottish water biscuit or ship's hardtack than to anything sweet, and comparable to matzoh and the Indian chapati in method if not in origin. It appears in the Five Roses Cook Book, a milling-company promotional collection assembled from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives, and the credit to Mrs. A. W. Fraser of Iron Springs, Alberta is characteristic of the book, whose contributions came in from prairie settlements. Wafers like these were eaten with cheese and soup.