Beat the yolks of 4 eggs; add 1 cup of butter and 3 cups of sugar beaten. Add the whites beaten stiff and a teaspoonful of lemon extract. Add enough flour with a teaspoonful of baking-powder to make a stiff dough. Roll out thin; cut into small cookies and bake in a quick oven to a light brown.
A rolled sugar cookie with no measured flour, which is the only real difficulty. Everything else is straightforward once you translate the oven.
- Quick ovenUsually reckoned at around 400-450F. Thin rolled cookies at that heat colour in about 5 to 7 minutes, so watch them from minute four rather than trusting a timer.
- "Enough flour"Expect roughly 5 to 6 cups for this quantity of butter, sugar and eggs. Add it a cup at a time and stop when the dough holds together and no longer sticks to the fingers; too much makes the cookies dry and hard rather than crisp.
- 1 cup of butterTwo sticks, 8 oz, and it should be softened rather than melted so it will cream with the sugar. Period butter was often salted; if yours is unsalted, add about half a teaspoon of salt, which the recipe omits entirely.
- Three cups of sugarThat is a high ratio even for a 19th-century cookie and gives a very sweet, crisp, sandy result. Cutting it to two cups produces something closer to modern taste, though you will then need correspondingly less flour to reach a stiff dough.
- Beating whites separatelyWhipping the whites stiff and folding them in was a common way of adding lightness in earlier baking, and it survives here alongside the baking powder. In a stiff rolled dough most of that air is lost when you knead in the flour, so nothing is harmed by simply beating the whole eggs in together.
- Chill before rollingThe dough as mixed is soft from a full cup of butter. An hour in the refrigerator makes it roll thin cleanly and keeps the cut shapes from spreading.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon of extract is the whole flavour here. The zest of one lemon added alongside it gives a fresher note, since alcohol-based extract loses some aroma in a hot oven.
- YieldNot stated. Cut small, as directed, this makes about six to eight dozen thin cookies -- easily halved.
Books of this kind, arranged one dish per day of the year with a nationality attached to each, were a popular format in the early 1900s: they gave a housekeeper a year's menus and a whiff of cosmopolitan travel at the same time. The "French" label on a plain rolled lemon cookie is doing more marketing than geography, since the method -- creamed butter and sugar, eggs, whites beaten separately, flour worked in until stiff, rolled thin and cut -- is the standard American sugar cookie of the period, the same one that turns up as sand tarts and lemon jumbles. What is genuinely of its moment is the teaspoon of baking powder: it had become common in home baking by the 1890s, though soda and saleratus remained in wide domestic use well into the 20th century, and recipes from those decades name it casually, as a thing every kitchen shelf held.