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Port Hope Biscuits
Mrs. Crawford.
Two eggs, two cups sugar, one of butter, one-half cup of milk, one teaspoonful of cream tartar, one teaspoonfu of carbonate soda, flour sufficient to roll very thin, flavour with nutmeg.
A rolled sugar cookie in all but name, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew the method. The flour is left to your judgement, which is the only real difficulty.
- "Biscuits" means cookiesIn nineteenth-century Canadian and British usage a biscuit is a thin, crisp sweet cracker, not the American soda biscuit. Expect something closer to a shortbread or sugar cookie than to anything served with gravy.
- Flour is the missing measure"Sufficient to roll very thin" with this quantity of butter, sugar and egg lands somewhere around 4 to 5 cups, but it depends on your eggs and how soft the butter is. Add it until the dough is firm enough to roll without sticking and no further, since extra flour makes them tough rather than crisp.
- The leavening is unbalancedEqual teaspoons of cream of tartar and carbonate of soda leaves roughly half the soda unneutralised, which can give a faintly soapy or metallic edge. Period cookbooks commonly give two parts cream of tartar to one of soda; the sour note is less noticeable in a heavily spiced dough, which may be why the nutmeg is here.
- Carbonate of sodaPlain baking soda. Dissolve it in the half cup of milk rather than dumping it into the flour, and sift the cream of tartar with the flour so the two do not meet until the dough comes together.
- Method, unstatedCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk and flour alternately. Chill the dough for an hour before rolling; it is soft and will fight you at room temperature.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range. Bake thin rolled cookies at 375F for 7 to 10 minutes, until the edges just colour. They crisp as they cool.
- NutmegGrate it fresh from the whole seed. Pre-ground nutmeg loses its volatile oils quickly and about a teaspoon of freshly grated is right for this quantity of dough.
- YieldRolled thin and cut at two to two and a half inches, this makes at least five or six dozen and quite possibly more. It is a large batch by modern standards and halves without trouble.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," and sold to benefit the Hospital for Sick Children — one of the earliest and most successful Canadian community cookbooks, assembled from contributions signed with the donor's name, as this one is by Mrs. Crawford. Port Hope is a Lake Ontario town east of Toronto. What is more telling is the leavening: cream of tartar and soda used as a pair, rather than a commercial baking powder, which was available by this date though some cooks went on mixing their own.