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Eggless Cookies
Two cups sugar, one of milk, one of butter, half tea-spoon nutmeg, half tea-spoon soda, flour to make thick enough to roll.
A plain rolled cookie from an era when eggs were seasonal and expensive. The dough is stiff, sweet and short, and the whole method rests on adding only as much flour as it takes to roll it.
- Flour to make thick enough to rollWith two cups sugar, one cup milk and one cup butter you will need roughly 5 to 6 cups of flour, added a cup at a time until the dough leaves the bowl clean and rolls without sticking. Stop at the first point it handles; every extra cup makes the cookie harder.
- Cup of butterOne cup is 8 oz, two American sticks. Nineteenth-century butter was often lightly salted farm butter; if using unsalted, add about half a teaspoon of salt, which the recipe otherwise omits entirely.
- Soda with sweet milkHalf a teaspoon of soda in plain sweet milk has little acid to react with, so the lift is slight and the flavour can turn faintly soapy. Sour milk, often on hand in period kitchens, is what makes soda work properly; with fresh milk, about a teaspoon and a half of baking powder in place of the soda will give a comparable rise.
- NutmegGrate it from a whole nut. Half a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg is the dominant flavour here, and pre-ground jars have lost most of what the recipe is counting on.
- Rolling and cuttingChill the dough an hour before rolling; the high butter content makes it slack at room temperature. Roll about a quarter-inch thick and cut with a plain round cutter.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range. A moderate oven, 350–375F, for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just coloured and the centres still pale.
- Fried or bakedThe dough as written is a rolled cookie dough and is meant for the oven; it is too soft-crumbed and too sweet to fry well.
- YieldAbout five dozen two-and-a-half-inch cookies. They keep a week in a tin and firm up considerably on the second day.
Eggless recipes were a practical category, not a dietary one. Hens laid little in cold weather, and through a northern winter eggs were either scarce or costly enough that a household cook kept a set of formulas that did without them, leaning on butter and milk for richness and on soda for whatever rise was possible. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and first published in Ohio in 1877, was assembled from contributions by working housewives, and books of that kind record the same thrift: recipes built around whatever staple happened to be short. The nutmeg is the tell of the period too, a spice kept in an ordinary American pantry alongside cinnamon, cloves and ginger, bought whole and grated as needed.