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Cookies
One cup sugar, one-half cup butter, two eggs, three teaspoons baking powder, three tablespoons boiling water.
A terse village receipt of the kind written down for someone who already knew how cookies were made. As printed it lists no flour and no method, so it needs reading as a ratio rather than a set of instructions.
- The missing flourNo flour quantity is given, which is almost certainly an omission rather than a shorthand. A dough on this base normally takes roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of flour, added until it is stiff enough to roll, but the original does not say so and any figure here is an estimate.
- No flavouring eitherMany rolled-cookie receipts of this proportion call for vanilla, lemon extract or grated nutmeg, and none is named here. Like the flour, it may simply have gone unwritten.
- The boiling waterThree tablespoons of boiling water is the only unusual element in the list. It would soften the butter and help dissolve the sugar, and heat will also begin to activate the baking powder, so the dough is best not left standing. The original gives no order of working.
- Baking powder strengthBaking powder -- three teaspoons works out at roughly a teaspoon per cup of the flour such a dough would take, which is close to modern practice. Baking powders of the period varied in strength and many were single-acting; with today's double-acting powder the result will lean puffy and cakey rather than crisp.
- ButterHalf a cup is one stick, 4 oz. Nineteenth-century butter was often salted and sometimes quite heavily; if using unsalted, a scant quarter teaspoon of salt brings the balance back.
- YieldDepending on how thin they are rolled and the cutter used, this quantity gives somewhere around three to four dozen small cookies.
Community cookbooks were assembled from receipts contributed by neighbours, and the contributors wrote as they spoke: an ingredient list, no method, and an assumption that anyone reading already knew what a cookie dough should feel like under the rolling pin. That is why the flour is missing here. The word cookie itself came into American English from the Dutch koekje, a little cake, and survives in the United States where Britain says biscuit, a linguistic trace generally credited to the Dutch settlement of New York and the Hudson Valley. Chemical leavening in a cookie dough suggests a comparatively late receipt; commercial baking powders were on sale from the 1850s and became common household goods in the later nineteenth century, and older cookie receipts rely instead on saleratus, pearlash, or nothing at all.