Maple Cookies
1 egg 1 cupful sugar 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful sour cream 1 teaspoonful baking soda 3 tablespoonfuls hot water 1/2 teaspoonful salt Flour Maple sugar ream Crisco and sugar together, add egg well beaten, mix well, add cream, salt, soda dissolved in water, and sufficient flour to make of right consistency to drop from spoon. Grate some maple sugar on each cookie and bake in moderate oven eight minutes.
Sufficient for forty cookies.
A soft sour-cream drop cookie whose only seasoning is a dusting of grated maple sugar. The dough is deliberately loose, and the flour is left to the cook's judgement.
- Flour quantityThe original gives no measure, only "sufficient flour... to drop from spoon." With one cup of sour cream and one of sugar, expect roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour; add it in stages and stop when the dough mounds on the spoon rather than running off it.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F (period "moderate" ran about 350-375F). At that heat eight minutes is right for small spoonfuls -- the cookies should be set at the edge and still pale on top. They are meant to stay soft and will dry out badly if left to brown.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote Crisco, then a new all-vegetable shortening. Any solid shortening works, or the same volume of softened butter, which will give more flavour and a slightly flatter cookie.
- Sour creamPeriod sour cream was thick, unhomogenised and genuinely soured. Full-fat cultured sour cream is the closest thing on a modern shelf; do not substitute the light or reduced-fat kinds, which carry too much water for a dough this loose.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the baking soda in three tablespoons of hot water before it meets the cream avoids the bitter yellow specks left by undispersed soda. Add it near the end and get the trays into the oven promptly, since the reaction with the acid cream starts at once.
- Maple sugarHard cakes of maple sugar are still sold in maple-producing regions and grate readily. Failing that, maple sugar sold granulated can be pressed onto the tops, though it dissolves more than it crusts. Maple syrup is not a substitute here -- it will bleed into the dough.
- YieldForty cookies from this quantity means teaspoon-sized drops, not modern cookie-scoop mounds. Space them about two inches apart; the dough spreads.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbooks published by manufacturers to teach cooks how to use a new product, in this case Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911. Nearly every recipe in the book calls for it, often in places where an earlier cookbook would have said butter or lard. The rest of this cookie is much older practice: sour cream and saleratus, or baking soda, was one common leavening approach among several in the nineteenth-century American farm kitchen, where soured cream was a byproduct of keeping a cow rather than something bought. Grated maple sugar as a topping points to the Northeast and eastern Canada, where hard-cake maple sugar was cheaper and kept better than syrup, and was routinely grated over baked goods the way a modern cook would reach for cinnamon sugar.