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Pepper-Nuts
One pound sugar, five eggs, half pound butter, half tea-cup milk, two tea-spoons baking-powder, flour enough to roll. -Mrs. Emma G. Rea.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in community cookbooks, where the contributor assumed everyone already knew what pepper-nuts looked like. Nothing here tells you how big to make them or how to cook them, so the two decisions that matter are left to you.
- Baked or fried is genuinely unclearThe recipe gives no cooking method, and pepper-nuts in the German tradition are almost always baked, though the dough as written is stiff enough for either. If baking, small balls should take roughly 12-15 minutes in a moderate oven (about 350F), but that is a modern guess, not the book's instruction.
- Weights to volumeOne pound of granulated sugar is about 2¼ cups; half a pound of butter is 2 sticks or 1 cup. A tea-cup of the period ran to about 6 fluid ounces, so half a tea-cup of milk is roughly 3 fluid ounces, or 6 tablespoons.
- "Flour enough to roll"With five eggs and a cup of butter, expect somewhere between 5 and 6 cups. Stop when the dough holds a rope without slumping; more flour than that gives a cookie that stays hard rather than crisp.
- No pepper in the pepper-nutsThe name comes from a spiced original, and most versions carry black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, nutmeg or anise. Mrs. Rea gives none. If you want the dish the name promises, a teaspoon or two of mixed warm spice with a good pinch of black pepper is in keeping with the tradition.
- SaltNineteenth-century butter was usually salted for keeping, though recipes often call for washing the salt out. With unsalted butter, add about ¾ teaspoon of salt or the dough tastes flat.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons in this quantity of dough is a light hand by modern standards, and period baking powders varied in strength. Pepper-nuts are meant to be dense and hard, not puffed, so leave the amount alone unless you want a softer cookie.
- ShapingRoll the dough into ropes about ¾ inch thick and cut into pieces the size of a hazelnut, which is where the "nut" comes from. They spread very little.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a very large batch; the count depends entirely on how small you roll them. They are supposed to harden on standing; kept in a tin they soften slowly over a week or two and were meant to be eaten that way.
Pepper-nuts are the American descendant of the German Pfeffernüsse and the Dutch pepernoten, small hard spiced cakes associated with the Christmas and St. Nicholas seasons. The "pepper" is generally traced to the medieval habit of calling any strong imported spice mixture pepper, though many versions do contain real black pepper; the "nut" is simply the size and shape. They appear in Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Minnesota and Ohio in 1877, the kind of contributed household collection through which such baking passed into general use. Mrs. Rea's version has lost its spices altogether, though whether that reflects a change in the recipe itself or simply a contributor's shorthand, on the assumption that the spicing was known, is not something the book tells us.