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Cream Cookies
One cup butter, one cup sour cream, two cups sugar, two eggs, sufficient flour to make a soft dough; sprinkle sugar on top and roll in with rolling-pin. Bake in hot oven.
A rolled sugar cookie of the sour-cream type, written for a cook who already knew the proportions. Two things in the original need attention before you begin: the missing leavening and the vague oven.
- The missing sodaSour cream in receipts of this period was commonly paired with saleratus or soda, and the omission here may be an oversight, though the printed text gives no leavening at all. Without soda — a common modern rule of thumb is around half a teaspoon to a teaspoon per cup of sour cream — the dough will be dense and faintly sour.
- "Hot oven"For a rolled cookie this is usually read as somewhere around 400-425F. At that heat a cookie rolled a scant quarter-inch thick should bake in roughly 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges just colour; watch it rather than the clock.
- Sour cream then and nowNineteenth-century sour cream was ordinarily raw cream left to sour naturally, and would have varied in thickness and acidity from batch to batch. Modern full-fat sour cream works; low-fat versions add water and slacken the dough.
- "Sufficient flour"The original gives no figure; with this much butter, cream and sugar expect to need a good deal, likely five cups or more. Stop while the dough is still soft and slightly tacky — enough to roll on a floured board and no more, or the cookies turn hard.
- Chill before rollingWith a full cup of butter the dough is unmanageable at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator makes it roll cleanly and holds the cut edges.
- Rolling in the sugarSprinkle the sugar over the rolled sheet and pass the pin over it once so the grains embed in the surface. Sugared side up on the sheet; it will not need greasing beyond the butter in the dough.
- YieldA large batch; roughly four to five dozen two-and-a-half-inch cookies, depending on how much flour the dough takes and how thin you roll it.
Sour-cream cookies belong to the era before commercial baking powder was universal, when a household's souring cream and a spoonful of saleratus did the lifting between them — the acid in the cream and the alkali in the soda reacting in the bowl. That the leavening goes unmentioned here is characteristic of the genre: receipts contributed to community cookbooks were written down by neighbours recording what they already made by feel, for readers assumed to know the same things. Rolling sugar into the surface with the pin, rather than dusting it on after baking, gives the thin crackled glaze that distinguishes these from a plain sugar cookie.