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Using Up Left-Over Pie Dough
Cut into thin strips about 1 inch wide, sprinkle with butter, sugar and cinnamon, roll up like jelly roll, and bake a light brown.
WELL-MADE bread or pastry baked from Five Roses flour possesses excellent keeping qualities.
It surely is a great convenience and quite a saving in both fuel and labor to bake only once a week instead of twice. None but Five Roses flour has so many desirable features.
Barely a recipe and more of a thrift note, but it works, and it needs a few numbers the original never gives.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is stated at all; the original assumes a cook who already knows her range. As a modern working figure, pastry trimmings want a hot oven, 400-425F, for roughly 10-15 minutes; they are thin and will colour fast.
- The hinge: don't knead the scrapsRe-rolled pie dough turns leathery if it is worked like bread. Press the trimmings together in a flat stack, chill them 15 minutes, then roll once. The layering is what keeps them tender.
- "Sprinkle with butter"Butter cannot literally be sprinkled; most likely this means dotting with small pieces or flakes of butter, or brushing with melted butter. Melted is easier and gives a more even coat for the sugar to stick to.
- Sugar and cinnamon proportionsNone are given. A workable ratio is 2 tablespoons granulated sugar to 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, which covers about a cup of trimmings.
- Strip size and rollingOnly the width, about 1 inch, is given; the length is left to whatever the scraps allow, so the size of the finished pinwheels will vary. Roll from the short end so the spiral is tight, and set them spiral side up with a little space between; the butter and sugar will run.
- Pan and cleanupLine the sheet. The escaping sugar caramelises and welds to bare metal, and these are too small to pry off intact.
- YieldThe trimmings from a single 9-inch double-crust pie make roughly a dozen. They are best the day they are baked.
- The last three sentencesEverything after "bake a light brown" is advertising for the flour, not instruction. Five Roses was a milling brand, and the book was published to sell it.
Cookbooks issued by flour millers were among the most widely distributed kitchen manuals in North America in the early twentieth century, and Five Roses, from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, was the Canadian standard-bearer; copies turn up in farmhouse kitchens across the prairies to this day. The scrap-pastry pinwheel belongs to a whole genre of instructions for using up what is left in the bowl, sitting alongside advice on stale bread and bacon fat. The line about baking once a week rather than twice is the real period detail: in a house with a wood or coal range, bringing the oven up to baking heat took an hour or so and a full baking day was long, and fuel and labour were the two costs a household could actually feel. The practice is older than any name for it.