Cookies
One-half a cupful butter, one-half cup lard, two cups sugar, one cup sweet milk, two teaspoonfuls cream tartar, one teaspoonful soda, a little nutmeg and salt, one egg. Enough flour to mix not very stiff.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the kind kept in a stone jar for supper and lunch pails. The original gives no oven temperature, no rolling thickness and no yield, so all three need supplying.
- OvenNo temperature is stated because wood ranges were judged by hand. Bake these at 375F for 8-10 minutes, until the edges are just golden; the centers should still look pale.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh, unsoured milk, specified in period books to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that was equally common in a kitchen. Ordinary whole milk is what is meant.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTwo teaspoons cream of tartar with one of soda is the old formula for what a can of baking powder now supplies; it works out to roughly four teaspoons (a tablespoon and a bit) of double-acting baking powder. Keep the original pair if you like the faint tang it gives.
- The lardHalf butter and half lard produces a shorter, more tender cookie than all butter. Leaf lard or a good rendered lard is fine; if you substitute butter throughout, expect a firmer, crisper result and slightly more spread.
- "Enough flour to mix not very stiff"This is the whole difficulty of the recipe. Start with about 4 cups and add in quarter-cup increments until the dough just holds together and pulls from the bowl -- soft enough to feel tacky, firm enough to roll. Overshooting the flour is what turns these dry and tough.
- Chill before rollingA soft dough of this kind is far easier to handle after an hour in the refrigerator. Roll about a quarter inch thick and cut with a plain round cutter.
- Nutmeg"A little" means roughly half a teaspoon, freshly grated. Nutmeg was among the most common flavourings in nineteenth-century American home baking, well before vanilla extract became a kitchen staple.
- YieldExpect about four to five dozen two-and-a-half-inch cookies. They keep a week in a tin and were meant to.
Recipes titled simply "Cookies" fill nineteenth-century American household books, and they are almost always this: a rolled, mildly spiced sugar cookie built on butter or lard, milk, and a chemical leavening. The word itself is generally traced to the Dutch koekje, a little cake, and is thought to have entered American English by way of Dutch settlement in New York rather than from Britain, where the equivalent was called a biscuit. The pairing of cream of tartar with soda points to the period when both were sold separately by grocers, before commercial baking powder came to replace the two-jar method.