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Cookies
One cupful of white sugar, rolled fine, and mixed with a half-cupful of butter; a half cupful of sour cream, mixed with a half teaspoonful saleratus. Add two eggs thoroughly beaten. Season with caraway-seeds or nutmeg. Roll thin, sprinkle sugar on. Roll lightly once, cut them out in a circular shape and bake them in a quick oven.
Soda Cakes. Take one quart of flour, one teaspoonful of soda, and one of cream of tartar, dissolved in hot water; one tablespoonful of lard and one of butter, rubbed into the flour; a little salt, mix soft with sour milk or buttermilk, and cut with a tin in round cakes; bake in a quick oven.
Short-Cake. Mix with a pint of flour a lump of butter the size of an egg, rub up well with baking powder, or use two teaspoonfuls of cream of tartar in flour; powder fine one teaspoonful saleratus. Add one cupful of cold water. Make a stiff batter; add flour if needed. Bake on tin for tea. If you use buttermilk you will not need cream of tartar, nor as much butter.
Three related quick-breads run together on one page: a rolled sugar cookie, a soda biscuit, and a plain tea short-cake. The cookie recipe is the one that needs the most reconstruction, since it never states how much flour to use.
- The missing flourThe cookie dough lists sugar, butter, sour cream, saleratus and eggs but no flour at all, though it tells you to roll it thin. The original quantity is simply not recoverable from the text; a nineteenth-century cook added flour by feel until the dough could be rolled, which for this amount of liquid would land somewhere near three cups. Add it gradually and stop when the dough holds together and rolls without sticking.
- SaleratusSaleratus was a bicarbonate leaven, potassium bicarbonate at first and later sodium bicarbonate, close enough in function to modern baking soda; it was sold in lumps or coarse powder that had to be crushed and dissolved, which is why the short-cake says to 'powder fine' the saleratus. Use roughly the same volume of modern baking soda, and rely on the acid in the sour cream or buttermilk to activate it.
- Sour cream and sour milkThese meant naturally soured dairy, acidic enough to react with soda. Cultured sour cream works directly; for sour milk or buttermilk, use commercial buttermilk rather than sweet milk soured with vinegar, which is thinner and behaves differently in a biscuit dough.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 450F. Rolled cookies at that heat need roughly 6 to 8 minutes; the soda cakes and short-cake want 12 to 15 minutes, until risen and lightly coloured.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. A quart of flour in the soda cakes is roughly 4 cups by modern measure, and a pint in the short-cake roughly 2 cups.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThe soda-plus-cream-of-tartar pairing is homemade baking powder, used before commercial powder was in general use (though this page offers baking powder as an alternative in the short-cake). One teaspoon of soda to two of cream of tartar is the proportion usually given, though the soda cakes here use one of each. If substituting commercial baking powder, scale it to the recipe's own leavening rather than to a fixed amount per cup. Note that the short-cake calls for both cream of tartar and saleratus with only water, so the acid must come from the cream of tartar.
- Rolling the sugar inThe instruction to sprinkle sugar on the rolled sheet and roll lightly once presses the sugar into the surface rather than mixing it through. As the recipe directs, do this before cutting the rounds.
- YieldThe cookie dough makes about three dozen two-and-a-half-inch rounds. A quart of flour gives roughly twenty soda cakes; the short-cake is a single tin, cut in wedges or squares for four to six.
All three of these belong to the chemically leavened baking that swept American home kitchens in the middle of the nineteenth century, when saleratus and cream of tartar made it possible to raise a dough in minutes rather than waiting on yeast. "Cookie" comes from the Dutch koekje, a little cake, carried into American English through the Hudson Valley, and the caraway seasoning here is a survival of an older English and Dutch taste for seed cakes that had largely faded by the twentieth century. The grouping is telling: a cook who kept sour milk and buttermilk on hand from the churn could turn out cookies, biscuits and a tea cake from nearly the same handful of staples, and none of these recipes bothers to explain itself at length.