Home › Crullers and Doughnuts › Cookies (One cup butter two of sugar)
Cookies (One cup butter two of sugar)
One cup butter, two of sugar, one of cold water, half tea-spoon soda, two eggs and just flour enough to roll. - Mrs. Mary F. Orr.
A bare-bones rolled cookie of the kind cooks were expected to finish by feel. The whole recipe hinges on the last clause: add flour only until the dough will just hold a rolling pin, because every extra cup makes the cookies harder.
- Quantities in modern termsOne cup butter is 8 oz (225 g), two cups sugar about 400 g, one cup cold water 240 ml. The flour is left entirely to the cook; add it a half cup at a time until the dough will just take a rolling pin, and expect this much liquid to absorb a good deal of it.
- "Just flour enough to roll"Stop while the dough is still soft and slightly tacky, then chill it an hour before rolling. Chilling does the stiffening that extra flour would otherwise do, and keeps the cookies tender.
- The soda has nothing to react withThe soda has little to react with -- there is no acid ingredient here, so the half teaspoon of soda contributes mainly browning and spread rather than much lift. Bakers who want more rise can substitute baking powder.
- Butter and saltButter of the period was commonly salted, sometimes heavily, for keeping. With unsalted butter you may want to add about half a teaspoon of salt.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll about 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick on a lightly floured board; thinner gives the crisper cookie. Some cooks sprinkled sugar over the sheet and pressed it in with the pin before cutting.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the cook judged her own range. Bake at 350-375F, 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just brown. They firm as they cool, so pull them while the centers still look soft.
- YieldSeveral dozen 2-inch cookies, depending on thickness and on how much flour was worked in. The dough keeps several days wrapped in the refrigerator.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (first published in Ohio in 1877) was compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why this entry ends with a signature rather than a headnote. Recipes in that tradition were written as reminders for cooks who already knew the method, so proportions are given in cups of butter and sugar and the flour is left to judgment; the phrase "just flour enough to roll" appears again and again in the period. The soda is a holdover from the decades when saleratus and soda were doing the work that baking powder, commercially available from the 1860s onward, would gradually take over. "Cookie" itself is generally traced to the Dutch koekje, a little cake, and entered American English through New York well before books like this one made it standard usage nationwide.