Home › Village Receipts › Sugar Cookies (Miss Ethel Post)
Sugar Cookies (Miss Ethel Post)
— Miss Ethel Post
Two cups sugar, one cup shortening, one cup sour milk, two teaspoons of soda, one egg, a pinch of salt.
— Mrs. Joseph Murray
A community-cookbook shorthand: it lists what a cook of the period would not have had memorized and omits everything she would. Flour, mixing method, rolling and baking are all left to the reader.
- Flour is missing entirelyThe receipt gives no flour, yet the batter as written is a liquid. Expect to work in roughly 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose flour, added gradually, until the dough is soft but firm enough to roll about a quarter inch thick on a floured board.
- The soda is highTwo teaspoons of soda to one cup of sour milk is more than the acid can neutralize; the leftover alkali reads as a soapy, faintly metallic taste and browns the cookies quickly. Saleratus was less standardized than modern bicarbonate, which may account for some of the quantity. A cup of buttermilk will only carry about half a teaspoon of soda, so half to one teaspoon is nearer the mark.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered raw milk, thick and acidic. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute. Pasteurized milk left at room temperature tends to spoil rather than sour cleanly; if you have neither buttermilk, stir a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice into a cup of whole milk and rest it ten minutes.
- ShorteningAt this period the word usually meant lard, sometimes butter, occasionally the newer vegetable shortening. Butter gives the best flavor; lard gives a tenderer, more old-fashioned crumb.
- OvenNo baking instructions are given at all. As a modern starting point, bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just set and barely colored.
- FinishingWith enough flour worked in these are most likely rolled and cut rather than dropped, though the receipt does not say. Sprinkling the tops with granulated sugar before baking is traditional.
- YieldAbout five dozen cookies from a two-inch cutter. The dough handles far better after an hour chilled; the receipt says nothing either way.
- Two namesTwo credits appear: "Miss Ethel Post" ahead of the ingredients and "Mrs. Joseph Murray" after them. Most likely the first is the sign-off of the preceding receipt on the page and the second belongs to this one -- a common artifact of how these books were set and reprinted.
This is a page from a church or civic fundraising cookbook, a form of American recipe publishing very common from the 1870s through the 1930s: local women each contributed a favorite, and the proceeds went to the sponsoring organization. The receipts are written for neighbors who already knew how to make cookies, which is why flour and oven heat go unmentioned while the ratio of sugar to shortening to sour milk, the part that distinguished one woman's cookies from another's, is set down exactly. Sour milk and soda cookies persisted alongside commercial baking powder out of habit and economy, in kitchens where milk soured on its own in a cool cellar and a cook counted that as an ingredient rather than a loss.