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Nutmeg Cookies
Two cups white sugar, three-fourths cup butter, two-thirds cup sour milk, nutmeg or caraway seed for flavor, two eggs, half teaspoon soda, and six cups of flour, or enough to roll. Roll thin, and bake in a quick oven.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the kind that turned up beside doughnuts because the dough is handled the same way. The hinge is thickness: rolled thin and put in a hot oven, these bake in minutes and burn in a moment longer.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, roughly the acidity of buttermilk. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, two-thirds cup of whole milk with two teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- SodaHalf a teaspoon of baking soda is here to react with that acid, which is why plain sweet milk will not work as a swap. Books of this period often call the leavener saleratus; the term covered potassium bicarbonate as well as the sodium bicarbonate we now call baking soda, and by the later nineteenth century the two were sold more or less interchangeably.
- A quick ovenA hot one; modern glosses put it somewhere in the 400 to 425F range, though the book gives no temperatures. Rolled genuinely thin, cookies like these bake in only a few minutes and the edges will colour before the centres look done, so check the first tray early and set the timing from there.
- Flour is a range, not a numberThe phrase "or enough to roll" is the real instruction, with six cups as the guide figure. Start short of that and add only until the dough stops sticking to the board; how much you need will vary with the flour and the size of the eggs.
- Caraway seedA once-common cookie flavouring that has largely dropped out of American baking. The recipe gives no quantity; a teaspoon or so for the whole batch is a reasonable reading. If you use nutmeg instead, grate it from the whole nut, which is what a recipe of this date assumes.
- Chill before rollingWith three-quarters of a cup of butter and no chilling step given, the dough handles far better after an hour in the refrigerator, and thin cookies hold their edges instead of spreading.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar and five to six cups of flour make a large batch by modern standards, likely several dozen small cookies depending on how thin you roll and how large you cut. Halving it is reasonable.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) groups these with fried sweets even though they are baked, which suggests the grouping was by dough rather than by method: a stiff, sweet, egg-and-butter dough rolled on a floured board and cut, whether it then went into fat or onto a tin. Nutmeg was a common flavouring for that family of doughs in nineteenth-century American kitchens, cheap and shelf-stable in whole form and grated as needed on a small tin rasp. Caraway, offered here as the alternative, is often associated with British and German seed cakes and was still ordinary in American cookies at this date before falling out of favour in the twentieth century. The reliance on sour milk and soda rather than baking powder suggests a household where milk soured on its own as a matter of course and nothing was wasted.