Rose Leaves
1 cupful sugar 6 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful rose extract 2 cupfuls flour Cream Crisco, adding sugar gradually, then stir in eggs well beaten; add salt, extract, and flour. The dough should be soft. Now chill dough, then roll very thin, using sugar instead of flour, to dust rolling-pin and board. Cut out with small fancy cutter. Place on tins greased with Crisco and bake in moderate oven eight or ten minutes or until slightly browned. Sufficient for fifty small cakes.
Despite the section heading, these are thin rolled sugar cookies scented with rose. The dough is stiff, unleavened and short, so the two things that decide the result are the chill and the sugar used in place of flour on the board.
- Moderate ovenIn this period a moderate oven is generally taken as somewhere around 350-375F. At this thickness eight to ten minutes is right; pull them when the edges have just taken colour, since they crisp as they cool.
- Roll in sugar, not flourThis is the hinge. Dusting with granulated sugar avoids working extra flour into the dough and can give the baked surface a faint crackle.
- Chill properlyThe dough contains no liquid beyond the eggs and will be sticky when mixed. An hour in the refrigerator, wrapped flat, makes it rollable; work with half at a time and return the rest to the cold.
- CriscoSix tablespoons is three-eighths of a cup of vegetable shortening. Modern Crisco is reformulated without partially hydrogenated fat and behaves much the same here; unsalted butter can be substituted for flavour, though the cookies will spread a little more.
- Rose extractA teaspoon of true rose extract is a lot by present-day standards, and rosewater is not a straight swap — rosewater is far weaker, so a tablespoon or more would be needed, and it adds liquid. Begin with half a teaspoon of extract if you are unsure of your bottle's strength.
- No leaveningThere is none, and none is wanted. These are meant to be flat, thin and snappy, closer to a shortbread wafer than a cake.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives fifty small cakes; it does not state a cutter size or a thickness beyond "very thin". They keep well for a week in a tin.
This comes from a Crisco-sponsored cookery book of the 1910s, when Procter & Gamble was promoting its new vegetable shortening by commissioning full sets of recipes in which Crisco replaced butter and lard at every turn — hence the fat being named rather than simply called shortening. The rose flavouring is older than the product: rose water and rose extract were standard sweet-kitchen perfumes in English and American baking from the seventeenth century onward, and only lost ground to vanilla over the nineteenth as cheap vanilla extract became available.