welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
in the old cookbook show
today we're not going to do necessarily
a cookbook we're going to be working
from
these they were sent in by a viewer
thank you very much for sending them in
they are recipes from the home service
division of the boston
edison company and the idea
is that on each one of these sheets
there are four recipes
and they're perforated you're meant to
pull them apart and stick them into a
recipe card box
there was a standardized recipe card
size and little boxes and you used to
put your recipe cards in them i know
a lot of people still do that but i'm
sure there's a lot of people out there
who have never
experienced that for themselves little
cards with
with recipes on them most of them are
handwritten you'd go to your aunt's
house and she'd have a coffee cake and
you'd say oh that coffee cake's
wonderful and she'd pull out a
box of cards and you'd write it out the
recipe and take it home put it in your
box
these recipes are really interesting
they're from a period that spans the
late 1930s
into i'm going to say 1942
is the year that the one we're going to
do today and the subheading on the
recipe card that we're going to do today
is homemade goodies
for the boys in the service and we're
going to do a recipe called
canteen cookies now presumably you would
be making these cookies
to send to the boys in the service the
united states would have at that point
just
entered world war ii and so these would
be cookies that you would send off to
the troops
specifically asks you to use an electric
mixer
this is the boston edison company after
all so we're going to start out with
some butter and some brown
sugar
and we're going to cream this together
until it's light and smooth
okay while that creams together i'm
going to jump ahead a little bit
and we're going to deal with the nuts
and the fruit that go into this mixture
so it asks for seedless raisins
it asks for currents these are dried
currants
these are a dried corinthian raisin
and i am positive that a cookbook
from the united states in 1942 would be
asking for raisins
since it was illegal to grow
black currants or red currants which is
a completely different thing in the
united states in that time period
it's still in 2021 illegal in most
places in the united states
to grow currants but you didn't know
that
so i'm going to put those into a bowl
and it says to mix in a half a cup of
the flour this
this is to keep the fruit from sinking
you're supposed to coat the fruit and
the nuts with the flour
it's going to make them sticky and they
don't sink to the bottom
of your cake of your cookies of your pie
of whatever you're going to put them in
and if you can tell by the
derision in my voice and the expression
on my face
i don't think it really matters i've
done it both ways i've tested it both
ways
it really doesn't matter it's one of
those kitchen myths that just won't go
away
um but you see it repeated over and over
and over again and people
swear by it and if you're one of those
people that swears by continue go right
ahead continue
if you don't want to do it i'm going to
say it doesn't make any difference
now we're going to crack in two eggs
and once the eggs are mixed in the next
instruction is to add
sour milk so i have buttermilk
the buttermilk that you buy in a grocery
store today in canada and the united
states
is essentially soured milk it's milk
that has
bacteria added to it it's fermented it's
the same
thing so in goes two tablespoons
and that's mixing up nicely
now this is where the recipe gets a
little over complicated compared to what
it needs to be
it says to sift the soda with half of
the flour that's remaining because we've
already taken out some flour to put with
the
with the fruit and nuts
and then i'm supposed to put some of the
flour
the fruit and nuts into here then i'm
supposed to mix the spices with the
remaining flour and then add that flour
what i take from that is that it just
wants me to put the flour in in batches
mixed with the fruit so what i'm going
to do is
i'm going to mix the soda and the spices
all together
into the flour right now and then just
add it in batches so in goes the baking
soda
and there's cinnamon and
nutmeg so we'll grate the nutmeg in
and then we'll just give this a stir to
bring it together
okay so some of this flour goes in
to here so i'm going to mix the flour in
i'm just going to put it in by the scoop
full
let it mix in most of the way and then
put the next scoop in i'm supposed to
put in about half
of the flour that's in here
and this is pastry flour it's asking
specifically for pastry flour and it's
it's interesting because in this time
period
in a lot of the canadian cookbooks as
well most of the cookies
also use pastry flour although in canada
they call it cake and pastry flour
but essentially it's a softer lower
protein
flour that you're asking for okay now
i'm gonna tip in the fruit
so that's uh
raisins currants and pecans
even though it asks for walnuts
and i'm supposed to grate in the zest of
an orange so
not a whole orange it just says one
teaspoon
so just a little bit just to get a
little bit of the flavor
i'm going to say that's a teaspoon
okay and now we'll just put in the last
of the flour mixture
this is going to be a really stiff dough
and there's a notation
on here where it says three cups pastry
flour and someone's written beside it
two and a half and i wonder if that
means they found that three cups of
flour was too much
i guess we'll find out
now i'm supposed to drop these by the
teaspoon full
an inch apart and a teaspoon is a very
small amount so i'm going to do
this scoop size which i really like and
this
is so the scoop is
just over a tablespoon in size i think
it gives a really
nice cookie and it also says to put it
onto a greased tin
i'm using parchment paper i like using
parchment paper for those cookies where
it tells you to use a greased
tin and i save and reuse my parchment
paper
you can reuse it three four times if
you're careful with it
and if you don't want to reuse it that's
fine you just toss it out but i
think it's better than a greased tin
personally
so i'm supposed to have my electric oven
preheated to 375 degrees which i have
and we're going to bake these cookies
[Music]
hey glenn hi friends cookies canteen
cookies
from uh early 1942 the boston edison
company
they have an interesting texture on the
outside like they're like crinkly
cookies
yeah so these are the subtitle is
homemade goodies for the boys in the
service
um so 15 minutes it says to cooking for
15 minutes and it
took 15 minutes to bang on
hmm maybe they should have been 10
minutes
yeah they're pretty crispy like they're
crispy
had expected given what was in them to
be more of
um not a crispy texture but more towards
almost a muffin top texture does that
make sense
so maybe maybe 12 minutes would have
been better mm-hmm just a little bit
less a little bit less not much
it's hard to tell though because it i
mean it looks right
yeah the flavor is really good yeah it's
got a nice little
like a citrus flavor to it a little bit
of orange in it yeah
a little bit of orange nutmeg cinnamon
i like that i think it'd be great dunked
in a cup of tea but then you know give
me
anything and i will dunk it in a cup of
tea and have a smile
i was also going to say dunk in a tea
and tea well because it's got that
it's the perfect texture it'll just suck
up the tea
to make it all tasty and maybe that was
the point
maybe we've misunderstood the point of
the cookies and they're meant to be you
know
they don't break down when they travel
down when they travel
yeah they don't go bad or stale when
they're traveling because they're
yeah i don't normally like
dried cranberries but i think a dried
cranberry and this would go really
nicely
any dried fruit anyway okay
i think another cookie for a rotation
thanks for stopping by see you guys soon
you