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Fruit Whirls
Two cups flour, 4 tsp. Royal baking powder, 1 tsp. salt, 2 tbsp. shortening, 3/4 cups milk, little sugar. Mix same as for biscuits. Pat out thin and spread with molasses or honey, sprinkle with Slade's cinnamon, raisins, prunes or dates. Roll as a jelly roll, cut one inch slices and bake in hot oven twenty minutes.
— Mrs. J. C. Montgomery
ADA MacKAY BROWN.
A biscuit-dough cinnamon roll, mixed and baked in under half an hour. The dough is the whole recipe; everything after "pat out thin" is assembly.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is more than a modern biscuit ratio (usually about three teaspoons to two cups), and with today's double-acting powder some tasters may notice a chemical edge. Around three teaspoons gives ample lift for a rolled dough.
- Brand namesRoyal baking powder and Slade's cinnamon are the kind of named-brand callouts common in church-society cookbooks; whether they were paid or simply habitual is not recoverable from the page. Any baking powder and any ground cinnamon do the same work.
- "Little sugar"Read this as 1 to 2 tablespoons in the dry ingredients. The molasses or honey filling supplies most of the sweetness, so the dough only needs enough to keep it from tasting like a plain biscuit.
- Mix same as for biscuitsCut the shortening into the dry ingredients until it looks like coarse meal, add the milk all at once, and stop as soon as it comes together. Overworked dough gives tough whirls rather than flaky ones.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400 to 450F. Toward the upper end the slices may colour before the stated twenty minutes, so check at fifteen, since molasses and honey scorch on the exposed edges.
- Pat out thinAbout a quarter inch, in a rectangle; the recipe gives no dimensions. Thin dough means more turns of filling; thick dough leaves an underbaked centre.
- FillingMolasses and honey run when warm, so spread sparingly and leave a bare half inch along the far edge to seal. Chop prunes and dates small; whole dried fruit forces the coil apart when sliced.
- Yield and panRoughly a dozen one-inch slices, depending on how far the dough is rolled out. Set them cut side up in a greased pan, close but not touching, and eat them the day they are made -- biscuit dough stales fast.
Philathea cook books were produced by Philathea classes, the women's Bible-study classes of the Baraca-Philathea movement, which began in the 1890s and spread widely through North American Sunday schools in the following decades, raising money by collecting members' recipes with their names attached. That origin plausibly explains the double signature here -- a contributor's recipe and the name of the woman who submitted or compiled it -- and the brand names printed in full; commercial sponsorship of such books did occur, though there is no evidence here of Royal supplying copy or underwriting this printing. The dish itself is the thrifty cousin of the yeasted cinnamon roll: baking powder biscuit dough rolled jelly-roll fashion, a method that appears under various names in this period because it needs no rising time and uses whatever dried fruit and molasses the pantry already holds.