Land of Hope and Glorious Sweets
Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in downtown Toronto in the 1950s and ‘60s, we were poor but didn’t know it. We could ride our bicycles to High Park for adventure. We had the public library for entertainment. And the TTC took us cheaply to Kew Beach and Toronto Island for weekend picnics and swimming. Dufferin Street Presbyterian was our church home and an integral part of my family’s life. Every Sunday we walked together to church, dressed in our Sunday best. On Easter Sunday, if it was warm enough, my sister and I got to wear new spring hats and, perhaps, new patent leather shoes. My brothers sported their Eaton’s catalogue matching blazers with piped trim.
With the arrival of more and more immigrants our neighbourhood, at Lansdowne and Dupont, underwent a sweeping demographic change. Most of the newcomers were Catholic, and the Catholic churches were full to overflowing. At the same time, Canadian families started moving out to modern houses in Etobicoke and Scarborough.
With this exodus to the suburbs, our small congregation dwindled down to a smattering of elderly couples and a core group of spinsters and widows, many of them originally from Scotland and England. There were almost no families with children to populate the Sunday school, youth groups and junior choir. Watching the congregation numbers drop might have seemed sad, but in fact, it turned out to be a boon for me.
With so few other children present, I became a pet of the church ladies who sang in the choir and taught Sunday School. They took an interest in me, asked questions about school, scolded me when I needed it and praised me when I deserved it. But best of all, these heavenly ladies baked squares and cookies for church bazaars and teas. And they instilled in me a life-long passion for home-baked, British sweets.
I still dream of the iced Chop Suey Loaf larded with glacéed fruits, the buttered Scottish scones and oaty date squares, and a dazzling array of chewy bars combining coconut, walnuts, chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk.
My absolute favorite treat was an Empire Biscuit – two rounds of vanilla cookie, sandwiching a jam filling, and topped with vanilla icing and a maraschino cherry. We were still the Dominion of Canada then, and I couldn’t be happier if it meant we got to eat imperial sweets. Rule Britannia!
The Dufferin Street church was decommissioned in the 1970s and it was decades before I re-encountered those Empire Biscuits, at Wychwood Presbyterian, my mother’s new church home on St. Clair Avenue West. Sadly, that church is about to be sold, another victim of changing demographics. But I bagged the biscuit recipe before it disappeared along with the church. Here it is, for posterity, courtesy of Mrs.Edna Campbell, who in her mid-nineties is still a member of Wychwood.
(From Dorothy MacKinnon, San Jose, Costa Rica.)
Edna Campbell’s Empire Biscuits
1 cup shortening
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
2 ½ cups all purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsps. Cream of Tartar
1 tsp. salt
Vanilla icing, raspberry jam and red glazed cherry pieces.
Method
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Cream shortening, sugar and eggs. Add vanilla. Add dry ingredients and mix until “creamed.”
Roll out dough and cut with a round cookie cutter. Put on greased cookie sheet and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until cookies are just turning golden.
Let cool. Sandwich together with jam in the middle. Ice with vanilla icing and decorate with a piece of cherry.
(This recipe makes a large quantity of cookies, depending on the size you cut them. But it can esily be sut in half.)
