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Soft Cookies
One heaping cup of butter and lard, one and one-half cups of sugar, two eggs (whites and yolks beaten separately), three tablespoons of sour milk, one small teaspoon of soda dissolved in milk, and as little flour as will make them stiff enough to roll. Sprinkle nutmeg and sugar over the top, and bake a light brown.
— Miss Florence Hand
A rolled soft cookie of the sour-milk-and-soda type, leavened without baking powder. The recipe assumes you know what cookie dough should feel like, since it never gives a flour quantity.
- The hinge: as little flour as possibleThe dough should be just barely rollable and will feel softer and stickier than modern sugar-cookie dough. Chilling it an hour makes it manageable without adding flour; every extra spoonful of flour trades away the softness the recipe is named for. Expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups, but go by feel.
- Butter and lard"One heaping cup of butter and lard" means the two combined, in whatever proportion the cook had — half and half is the usual reading. Lard gives tenderness, butter gives flavour; all butter works, and modern leaf lard or shortening substitutes directly.
- Sour milkThis is naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Pasteurised milk left out tends to spoil rather than sour cleanly, so use buttermilk, or three tablespoons of milk with about a quarter to a half teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred in and left five minutes.
- Soda"One small teaspoon" is a scant teaspoon of what the period often called saleratus, a term covering potassium bicarbonate as well as the sodium bicarbonate we now call baking soda; modern baking soda is the working equivalent. Dissolving it in the sour milk is deliberate; add the mixture last and get the dough into the oven without long delay, as the lift begins immediately.
- Separated eggsBeating the whites separately, and folding them in towards the end, is the usual handling and helps lighten the crumb. The recipe specifies the separation, though in a dough stiff enough to roll most of the lift will come from the soda and sour milk.
- OvenThe book gives no oven guidance beyond "a light brown", assuming a wood range judged by hand. A moderate oven, around 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, suits them: take them out when the edges are just coloured, since a fully browned cookie of this type will be dry.
- Nutmeg and sugarSprinkle on the rolled and cut dough before baking, not after; the text puts the sprinkling before the bake. Nutmeg was commonly grated fresh from the whole nut at this date, and freshly grated is noticeably better than the pre-ground kind.
- YieldAbout four dozen cookies cut at 2 1/2 inches. They keep soft for two or three days in a tin and stale quickly after that, which is characteristic of the style.
Sour milk and saleratus cookies were the standard American home baking chemistry through most of the nineteenth century, before commercial baking powder became cheap and universal; a household that kept a cow or bought raw milk always had souring milk on hand, and the soda turned that acidity into lift. "Soft cookies" appears to distinguish the dough from the crisp rolled sugar cookie or the harder, keeping "cakes" — this one is meant to be eaten within a few days of baking. The contribution is signed by name, as contributed recipes in compiled collections generally were, and little is explained: the recipe assumes a reader who already knows how stiff the dough should be.