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Peanut Cookies
One-half cup of butter, three-fourths cup of sugar, one egg, one-half cup of milk, three teaspoons of lemon juice, one and one-half cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, two cups of chopped peanuts; mix as for cake, adding peanuts last. Place pieces as large as a walnut on a large flat pan, buttered, about an inch apart; bake from twelve to fifteen minutes in a moderate oven.
— Mrs. H. P. Pettengill
A drop cookie of the plain church-supper sort, thickened with a very large proportion of chopped nuts. A few points make the batter behave.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is usually taken as somewhere in the 350 to 375F range. At that heat 12 to 15 minutes is right for walnut-sized mounds; they will still look pale and soft when the edges have set.
- "Mix as for cake"Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, then add the milk and lemon juice alternately with the flour and baking powder sifted together. Fold the peanuts in last, as directed, or they tear the batter.
- The peanutsTwo cups of chopped nuts to one and a half cups of flour is a heavy load. Use roasted, unsalted peanuts and chop them coarsely by hand; a food processor turns them to paste and the cookies go greasy.
- SaltThe receipt names none, presumably because the butter of the period was salted and the peanuts may have been too. If you use unsalted butter and unsalted nuts, add a half teaspoon of salt or the cookies taste flat.
- Lemon juice and milkThree teaspoons of lemon juice will curdle the half cup of milk slightly. That is not a fault; the acid may add a little to the baking powder's lift and keeps the sweetness from cloying.
- SpacingAn inch apart is close by modern habit. These spread moderately because of the nut content, but on a crowded sheet they will run together; two inches is safer.
- Pan"A large flat pan, buttered" is most likely a flat baking sheet. Parchment does the job better, since the high sugar and nut oil stick readily.
- YieldAbout three dozen cookies. They keep four or five days in a tin but soften; peanut cookies are best the day they are baked.
Peanut cookies belong to a wave of American recipes, generally traced to around the turn of the twentieth century, that treated the peanut as a novelty baking ingredient rather than a snack sold from a street cart. Cheap shelled and roasted peanuts became widely available in that period, and cookbooks of the day are full of peanut wafers, peanut bread, peanut soup and peanut macaroons, often presented as economical protein. Community books like this one, made up of receipts signed by named contributors from a single locality, are a valuable record of how quickly such novelties entered ordinary home baking: Mrs. Pettengill's cookie is described in the shorthand of someone who assumed the reader already knew how to mix a cake.