Drop Cakes
1 tablespoonful Butter or Lard, (melted) 1 cup Sugar, 1 cup sour Milk, 2 Eggs, 1/2 teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 1 tablespoonful Butter 2½ cups pastry Flour. or Lard, (melted) Cream together the sugar, yolks of the eggs, butter, (or lard), and add the sour milk and Soda (dissolved in a spoonful of lukewarm water). Mix all together, add the sifted flour and last the beaten whites of the eggs. Flavor with vanilla or lemon.
Drop with spoon on greased, flour dusted cookie pans.
This is a promotional-booklet recipe, and the ingredient column has come down to us incomplete: the quantities of sugar, eggs and sour milk are missing from the text, and no oven temperature or baking time is given. What survives is a standard sour-milk drop cookie, and the method is intact enough to follow if you supply the proportions.
- What is actually missingThe verbatim list gives only 1/2 teaspoon soda, 1 tablespoon melted butter or lard, and 2 1/2 cups pastry flour. Sugar, eggs and sour milk are named in the method but their amounts are lost. A conventional booklet formula of this era for 2 1/2 cups flour would run to about a cup of sugar, two eggs and a cup of sour milk, but that is reconstruction, not the original.
- The soda and the sour milk are a pairThe 1/2 teaspoon of soda is there to neutralise the acid in sour milk and give lift. If you substitute fresh milk the cakes will be flat and faintly soapy. Use real buttermilk, or clabbered milk, and dissolve the soda in a spoonful of warm water as directed so it disperses rather than leaving bitter flecks.
- Sour milk in 1900Sour milk -- In this period it meant raw milk left to clabber naturally. Today's pasteurised milk tends to spoil rather than sour cleanly. Cultured buttermilk is the usual stand-in.
- One tablespoon of fat is not an errorOne tablespoon of fat -- As the text stands these are lean, cakey drops rather than rich cookies. Bear in mind the ingredient column is damaged, so the figure cannot be fully verified; but taken at face value, increasing the butter to modern cookie levels will make them spread.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than all-purpose, roughly 8-9 percent. For a close match, replace 2 tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch, or use a soft-wheat flour such as White Lily.
- OvenNone is specified, and the recipe gives no oven term at all. A moderately hot oven, around 400F for 10 to 12 minutes, until set and just coloured at the edges, suits a drop batter of this kind; this is a modern suggestion, not from the text.
- The pansGreasing and then dusting with flour is worth keeping. A batter this slack with so little fat sticks readily, and parchment does the same job with less fuss.
- Whites lastThe beaten whites are folded in at the end and are part of the leavening. Work quickly once the soda is in and get the trays into the oven; the batter loses volume if it stands.
This recipe belongs to a long line of free pamphlets that soda and baking powder companies pressed on American housewives from the 1870s onward, pamphlets whose recipes generally served to sell the product in the title. That accounts for the odd emphasis here: the soda is listed first, with a trade name and quotation marks, in a cookie that needs half a teaspoon of it. The recipes also document a real kitchen practice that has since disappeared. Before reliable refrigeration, milk often soured before it could be used, and cooks treated sour milk as an ingredient rather than waste, pairing it with soda to raise cakes, biscuits and drop cookies. "Drop cakes" is one older name for what we would call a cookie -- batter dropped from a spoon rather than rolled and cut -- and the term is common in nineteenth-century American cookbooks.