Cookies
1/2 teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 2 cups brown Sugar 1/2 cup Lard, 2 Eggs, 4 tablespoonfuls warm Water, 1/2 cup Butter, 1/2 cup Sour Cream, 1/2 teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda.
A pinch of Salt and a little Nutmeg. › Cream together the sugar, butter and lard, adding the eggs, then the sour cream, salt, nutmeg and Soda which you dissolve in the warm water.
Then mix with sufficient cake flour to make dough stiff enough so you can roll it out. You can make different shaped cookies out of this dough.
Wash some with milk and dip in granulated or coarse sugar, others dip in currants, others in cocoanut, etc.
A rolled sugar cookie of the old sour-cream school, printed to sell baking soda. The original gives no flour quantity, no oven temperature and no time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Flour, the missing number"Sufficient cake flour" works out to roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups for a dough stiff enough to roll. Add it a cup at a time and stop as soon as the dough pulls clean from the bowl; the batter is wet and over-flouring turns these tough and dry.
- OvenNo temperature is given; the pamphlet assumes a cook judging her own range. Bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and just coloured. These are pale cookies and colour quickly at this sugar content.
- Sour creamPeriod sour cream was naturally soured cream rather than the stabilised cultured product sold now, and was likely thinner. Full-fat sour cream is the closest substitute.
- The sodaHalf a teaspoon is a modest amount for a batch this size; the sour cream supplies the acid it works against. Dissolving it in the warm water before adding is not decoration, it keeps undissolved soda from leaving bitter specks in the crumb.
- LardHalf a cup of lard gives the short, sandy texture these were built around. Modern shortening substitutes one for one; all butter works but spreads more and browns faster, so drop the oven to 350F if you go that way.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is soft from the cream and eggs. An hour in the refrigerator makes it roll at 1/4 inch without tearing or absorbing another cup of flour.
- The finishesMilk wash then coarse sugar, currants or shredded coconut pressed into the surface before baking. Press firmly; coconut colours fast, so watch that batch or bake it a minute short.
- YieldAbout five dozen cookies at 2 1/2 inches. This is a large batch by modern standards and halves cleanly.
Arm & Hammer's recipe pamphlets were advertising in the shape of a cookbook, distributed free from the late nineteenth century onward, and the recipes in them tend to exist to demonstrate that you need the soda. The pairing here is the older chemistry: before commercial baking powder was cheap and reliable, cooks raised cakes and cookies by combining bicarbonate of soda with a household acid, most often sour milk, sour cream or molasses. Farm kitchens often had cream on the turn, so a sour-cream cookie cost nothing extra. The instruction to divide one dough and finish it three ways — sugar, currants, coconut — is the kind of economy often associated with the period's baking, where a single mixing could yield a whole plate of apparent variety.