Mix ½ pound of butter and 1 cup of sugar to a cream; add 4 well-beaten eggs and the grated rind and juice of ½ lemon. Then stir in ½ pound of flour and work into a smooth dough. Lay on a well-floured baking-board and roll out thin. Cut into fancy shapes and bake in a moderate oven until done. Cover with a white icing, flavored with vanilla.
A lemon butter cookie in the old style, written for a cook who knew what a rolled dough should feel like. The flour is the point of difficulty.
- The flour will not be enoughHalf a pound of butter, a cup of sugar and four whole eggs against half a pound of flour (about 1¾ cups) gives a batter, not a rollable dough. Expect to work in additional flour — often another half pound — until the dough is firm enough to leave the board clean.
- Chill before rollingEven with the extra flour, the dough is soft from all that butter. An hour in the refrigerator, wrapped, makes rolling thin and cutting fancy shapes possible; a warm dough tears and spreads in the oven.
- Weights in modern terms½ pound butter is 2 sticks or 225 g; ½ pound flour is 225 g. Weighing the flour rather than scooping it matters here, since the original ratio is already borderline.
- "A moderate oven"Roughly 350-375°F. Thin cut-outs at that temperature are done in about 8 to 10 minutes — pale gold at the edges, still light in the center. They will look underdone when they should come out.
- Creaming and the eggsCream the butter and sugar until visibly lighter, then add the beaten eggs a little at a time. Four eggs poured in at once into a butter-sugar cream will split it; a spoonful of the flour brings it back.
- LemonGrate the rind before juicing, and use only the yellow zest. The juice from half a lemon is roughly 1 to 1½ tablespoons — enough to perfume the dough without slackening it further.
- White icingA confectioners' sugar glaze: about 1½ cups sifted sugar, 2 to 3 teaspoons water or milk, ½ teaspoon vanilla, thinned to a spreadable ribbon. Ice only after the cookies are fully cold or it soaks in and goes cloudy.
- YieldRolled thin and cut at about 2 inches, the batch gives several dozen cookies, likely more than five dozen depending on thickness. They keep a week in a tin once the icing has set hard.
This belongs to a genre of American novelty cookbooks popular around the turn of the twentieth century: one dish for each day of the year, each hung on the name of a country, with the geography doing more work as decoration than as documentation. The recipe here is a plain rich butter-and-lemon cut-out cookie of a kind found across Europe, and its claim on Greece rests mainly on the lemon — Greek home baking does lean heavily on citrus zest, as in koulourakia and the syrup-soaked cakes of the Lenten and Easter tables. What the page records is the American middle-class kitchen of its own moment: butter by the half pound, eggs assumed cheap and plentiful, and a vanilla-flavored white icing, a common finish for a fancy cookie in the period.<br><br>Note too the shorthand of the era — no pan size, no minutes, no temperature, only "bake in a moderate oven until done." A cook who had never rolled a butter dough was not the intended reader.