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Extra Good Cookies
Two eggs, one cup sugar, one cup flour, flavor to suit taste; drop with teaspoon, leaving room to spread.
— Mrs. Daniel J. Cassidy
Four words of instruction and no fat, no leavening, no oven setting. What this actually describes is a sponge drop: eggs and sugar beaten to a foam, flour folded in, baked fast so the batter sets before it runs off the sheet.
- The hinge is the beatingNothing else raises these. Beat the whole eggs with the sugar until pale, thick and tripled in volume — five to eight minutes with a mixer — then sift the flour over and fold, do not stir. Deflate the foam and you get thin brittle wafers instead of cookies.
- Cup measuresA cup of sugar is about 7 oz; a cup of flour, spooned and levelled, about 4 1/4 oz. The flour intended was most likely a plain household wheat flour, nearer modern all-purpose than bread flour, though milling and wheat type varied a good deal by region and date.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the cook knew her stove. Bake at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just tan and the tops spring back. These scorch quickly at the rim.
- "Flavor to suit taste"Left to the cook: vanilla or lemon extract, grated lemon rind or a scrape of nutmeg would all be plausible choices for a household of this kind. A teaspoon of extract is the right order of magnitude for this quantity of batter.
- Leaving room to spreadThe batter is loose and will roughly double in diameter. Space teaspoonfuls about two inches apart. Parchment is the modern equivalent of the buttered and floured tin she would have used, and it matters here because the sugar-heavy batter sticks.
- Yield and keepingAbout two dozen small cookies. They are crisp the day they are baked and go soft within a day or two in a humid kitchen; store airtight, and re-crisp for a few minutes in a low oven if needed.
Fat-free egg-and-sugar drops like this run through nineteenth-century American cookery under a shifting set of names — sponge drops, and "cookies" once the Dutch-derived word had spread from the Hudson Valley into general use. The recipe's economy is the point: no butter, no milk, no saleratus, just eggs from the yard, sugar, and flour, which made it the sort of thing a farm household could bake on short notice for company. It also explains the title. In a community cookbook assembled from contributed receipts, the name of the dish was often less a description than a recommendation, and "Extra Good" carried Mrs. Cassidy's reputation along with her four lines of instruction. Such books were typically printed to raise money for a church, a library or a village improvement society, and the assumption throughout is that the reader already knows how her own stove behaves.