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Christmas Cookies
Two cupfuls of sugar, two-thirds of a cupful of water, one-half cnp lard, one teaspoonful soda, one teaspoonful carroway seeds, and flour to roll out; bake quickly. A little salt.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the eggless, butterless sort that a farm kitchen could make from the pantry in December. Two things need attention before you start: how much flour "to roll out" actually means, and the fact that the soda has nothing acidic to work against.
- The flour is the whole recipeWith 2 cups sugar, 2/3 cup water and 1/2 cup lard, expect roughly 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 cups of flour to reach a dough stiff enough to roll thin. Add it gradually and stop as soon as the dough leaves the bowl clean; every extra half cup makes the cookie harder and drier.
- "Bake quickly"The recipe gives no oven detail, but the instruction points to a hot oven; around 400-425F is a reasonable modern reading. Thin rolled cookies at that heat are done in roughly 6 to 8 minutes, when the edges just take colour. They will still look pale in the centre and will crisp as they cool.
- Soda with no acidThere is no sour milk, molasses or cream of tartar here, so the teaspoon of soda gives only a little lift and can leave a soapy note. Dissolve it in the water before mixing so it disperses evenly, and level the spoon rather than heaping it.
- LardModern rendered leaf lard works as written and gives the short, sandy texture the recipe expects. Supermarket shelf-stable lard is hydrogenated and behaves more like shortening; unsalted butter, 8 tablespoons, is a fair substitute but the cookies will spread more and brown faster.
- Caraway seedsA full teaspoon in this quantity of dough is assertive by current taste. Crush the seeds lightly with the flat of a knife to release the oil, or halve the amount if caraway is unfamiliar to the table.
- "A little salt"Read that as about 1/2 teaspoon; the original leaves the amount to the cook's judgement.
- Typography"one-half cnp lard" is a misprint for cup.
- Yield and keepingRolled 1/8 inch thick and cut at about 2 1/2 inches, this makes several dozen, depending on how much flour the dough takes. Eggless dough of this kind keeps well for weeks in a tin, which suits baking in quantity for the holidays.
Caraway was a standard sweet-baking seed in English and Anglo-American kitchens long before vanilla was cheap, running from Elizabethan seed cake through to the nineteenth-century "caraway comfits" sold sugar-coated at fairs. A cookie like this one - sugar, water, lard, soda and flour, no eggs and no butter - belongs to the thrifty end of that tradition: it uses nothing that had to be bought fresh, rolls out by the yard, and hardens rather than staling, so a batch cut in December would still be sound weeks later in the crock.