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Snickerdoodles
Two cups of sugar, two-thirds cup of butter, two eggs, one cup sweet milk, four cups of flour, a pinch of salt, one teaspoon soda, two teaspoons cream tartar; drop in teaspoonfuls in a buttered baking pan, dust over with a mixture of granulated sugar and cinnamon, and bake in a moderate oven.
— Mrs. Walter S. Kniskern
This is the older, cakier ancestor of the modern snickerdoodle: a soft drop batter rather than a stiff dough rolled in cinnamon sugar. The receipt assumes you know how to mix a cookie batter, so the method has to be filled in.
- Moderate ovenNo temperature is given; "moderate" is usually taken as somewhere around 350°F. At that heat teaspoon-sized drops need roughly 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and just colouring and the centres still look soft.
- Method, which is not givenCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with the salt, soda and cream of tartar. Adding milk and flour together in stages keeps the batter from curdling or going tough.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda to two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, and the cream of tartar also supplies the faint tang that defines a snickerdoodle. Do not swap in commercial baking powder if you want that flavour.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk, which appear constantly in books of this period. Whole milk is the right choice.
- CupsAn American cup of this era is close enough to the modern 8 fl oz measure. Four cups of flour is about 500 g; if the batter is stiff enough to hold a mounded spoonful, it is right.
- Dropped, not rolledBecause the milk makes this a soft batter, the cinnamon sugar is dusted over the tops on the pan rather than rolled around the dough. Expect a flatter, more cake-like cookie with a crackled sugar crust.
- Buttered baking panA buttered sheet works, but the sugar topping catches and burns easily on a dark pan. Parchment on a light-coloured sheet is more forgiving.
- Topping proportionNo ratio is given; about a tablespoon of cinnamon to half a cup of granulated sugar suits this quantity of batter.
- YieldDepends entirely on the size of the drops; from this quantity of batter, teaspoon-sized drops will give several dozen. Being cakey, they are best eaten fresh.
The origin of the name is genuinely unsettled. It is commonly traced to the German Schneckennudeln, a cinnamon-sugar coil, though the more likely explanation is that it belongs to the family of nonsense cookie names — snipdoodles, cryboodles, plunkets — that turn up across nineteenth-century New England and Pennsylvania receipt collections. What is documented is that snickerdoodles appear in American community cookbooks by the late 1800s, and that early versions like this one are drop cookies leavened with soda and cream of tartar, before the stiffer rolled dough became standard. Cream of tartar, a by-product of winemaking, is what gives the cookie both its lift and its characteristic slight sourness; the fact that Mrs. Kniskern measures it separately rather than reaching for a tin of baking powder places her firmly in the older tradition.