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Filled Cookies
1 egg 1 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 1/2 cupful milk or cream 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 teaspoonful baking soda 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 3 1/2 cupfuls flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt
For Filling (Cupful chopped raisins)
1 cupful chopped raisins 1 tablespoonfuls flour 1/2 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful water 1/2 cupful chopped walnut meats For cookies. Cream Crisco and sugar, add salt, egg well flour sifted with baking powder and soda. Mix and turn out on floured baking board. Dough should be soft. Roll very thin and cut out with cooky cutter. Spread one-half of cookies with filling, then place remaining cookies on top and press edges together. Place on Criscoed tins and bake in moderately hot oven fifteen minutes.
For filling. Mix sugar and flour in saucepan, add raisins, nuts, and water, stir and cook until thick. Cool before using.
This is a formula rather than a set of directions: the book gives proportions and assumes the cook knows what to do with them. Filled cookies are a rolled dough, cut in rounds, with a spoonful of cooked filling sealed between two of them.
- No method, and no fillingThe page lists dough ingredients only. A dough of this kind would normally be made by creaming the shortening and sugar, beating in the egg, adding the milk and vanilla, then the sifted dry ingredients, chilling, rolling thin, and sandwiching a cooled filling between rounds with the edges sealed. No filling is given here; date, raisin or fig fillings cooked down with sugar, water and a little lemon are the ones that commonly appear in cookbooks of the period.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotional cookbook, so the shortening is named on purpose. Crisco was reformulated in 2007 to cut trans fat, but behaves much the same way; any solid vegetable shortening substitutes at equal volume, and butter can be used, though it carries water as well as fat. Butter will spread more and brown faster.
- CupfulA cupful here is the standard 8 fl oz measure. Flour was scooped and levelled rather than weighed; 3 1/2 cups is roughly 440 g. Flour strength varies, so hold back the last half cup until the dough comes together.
- Soda and powder togetherThere is no acid ingredient listed, so the teaspoon of soda is doing tenderising and browning work rather than the main lifting. Sour milk or buttermilk in place of the sweet milk -- a substitution some period recipes offer -- would give the soda an acid to work against, and the cookies would come out paler and more tender.
- RollingChilling the dough before rolling will make it easier to handle. Roll to about 1/8 inch; thicker rounds take longer to bake through.
- OvenAround 400F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just coloured. Cutting a small vent in the top round helps steam from the filling escape rather than bursting the seam.
- YieldRoughly three dozen filled cookies from 2 1/2-inch rounds, which is six dozen cut circles.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to sell Crisco, which had come on the market in 1911 as the first widely advertised all-vegetable shortening. Cookbooks like this one were one of the vehicles for teaching American cooks to substitute hydrogenated cottonseed oil for lard and butter, and the fact that the brand name appears in the ingredient list rather than the generic word "shortening" is the whole point of the book. Filled cookies themselves are older than the product, and the date-filled version became a standard of church suppers and lunch pails in the American Midwest.