White Cookies
2 cupfuls sugar 1 cupful Crisco 1/2 cupful thick sour milk 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1/2 teaspoonful lemon extract Flour Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, soda mixed with sour milk, salt, extracts, and about 5 cupfuls flour. Roll very thin, cut with cookie cutter, lay on Criscoed tins, bake in moderately hot oven five minutes. To keep any length of time, when cold, place in covered tin cans and set in cool place, and they will be as crisp as when first baked. Sufficient for ninety cookies.
A plain rolled sugar cookie from the Crisco era, built to be cut thin and stored in tins. The dough is stiff and the flour quantity is deliberately approximate.
- Flour is the variableFive cupfuls is a starting point, not a rule — add until the dough is firm enough to roll thin without sticking, then stop. Too much flour turns these dry and chalky rather than crisp.
- Oven"Moderately hot" here means about 375-400F. At five minutes, thin cookies go from pale to browned very quickly; watch the second tray onward rather than the clock.
- Sour milkThick sour milk was clabbered raw milk. Substitute buttermilk, or add 1 1/2 teaspoons vinegar or lemon juice to 1/2 cup milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is what activates the soda.
- CriscoThen and now a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, though the formula has changed: it was reformulated in the mid-2000s and has since been labelled 0g trans fat per serving, which means under half a gram rather than none. It gives a crisp, short cookie; butter can replace it cup for cup but will spread more and brown faster.
- "Criscoed tins"Simply greased baking sheets. Parchment does the job better and prevents the thin edges from over-browning.
- SaltA full teaspoon reads high for a cookie because the shortening is unsalted. Cut it to 1/2 teaspoon if using salted butter instead.
- Roll very thinThe recipe's ninety cookies implies a thin sheet and a modest cutter. Rolled thicker you get a soft cookie that will not keep crisp in a tin.
- Chilling and yieldThe dough is easier to handle after an hour in the refrigerator; work with a quarter at a time and keep the rest cold. Ninety cookies assumes a small cutter, around 2 inches.
White cookies — so called for the pale dough, no molasses, no spice, no brown sugar — were a staple rolled cookie of American home baking, set against the darker "brown" or ginger cookies. What dates this version is the shortening: Crisco appeared in 1911, and Procter & Gamble promoted it heavily through its own recipe booklets and cookbooks, so a recipe that specifies "Criscoed tins" rather than greased ones very likely comes out of that promotional literature. Vanilla paired with a little lemon extract turns up in other sugar cookie recipes of the period, and the closing note about covered tin cans in a cool place reflects a kitchen where crispness was a storage problem to be solved, not a given.