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Ada's Sugar Cakes
Three cups sugar, two of butter, three eggs well beaten, one teaspoon soda, flour sufficient to roll out.
A nineteenth-century sugar cookie in its barest form: five ingredients, no salt, no flavoring, and no oven note. The proportions are sound but assume a cook who knows what the dough should feel like.
- What the flour figure really is"Flour sufficient to roll out" with three cups sugar and two of butter lands somewhere near 6 to 7 cups, added a cup at a time until the dough is firm enough to handle without sticking. Stop as soon as it rolls cleanly; every extra cup makes the cake drier and harder.
- Two cups of butterThat is one pound. Butter of the period was usually salted, and the recipe adds none, so if you use unsalted butter add about a teaspoon of salt or the cakes taste flat.
- The soda has nothing to work onOne teaspoon of soda with no sour milk, molasses or cream of tartar leaves alkaline residue and a faint soapy, yellowish note. Substituting about two teaspoons of baking powder gives a comparable lift and a cleaner flavor.
- Baked or friedThe recipe gives no frying instruction, and a dough this rich in sugar scorches in fat. Sugar cakes of this type were generally rolled thin and baked; treat it as a cookie.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at about 350°F, roughly 8 to 10 minutes for quarter-inch rounds, until the edges just color.
- FlavoringNutmeg, caraway or a little lemon zest were the usual additions to a plain sugar cake and would not be out of place; the original leaves it to the cook.
- YieldA full batch is large by modern standards, on the order of six to eight dozen two-and-a-half-inch cakes. Halving it is straightforward.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Marysville, Ohio, 1877) drew on contributions from local women, whose credits are typically given as initials and a town. That contributory method helps explain the telegraphic style here, since the cook who sent it in was writing for neighbors who already knew what sugar cake dough looked like. The recipe belongs to the broad family of rolled sugar cookies that came into American kitchens once refined white sugar and chemical leavening both became cheap in the second half of the century; before saleratus and soda were household staples, a cake like this leaned on eggs and hard beating alone.