Mrs. Sidney Drew
2 tablespoons milk Celebrity
PEANUT
COOKIES
2 tablespoons butter 1/4 cup sugar 1 egg 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 cup flour 1/2 cup chopped peanuts ½ teaspoon lemon juice 1/4 teaspoon salt Cream butter, add sugar and well-beaten egg. Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt; add to first mixture, then add milk, nuts and lemon juice. Drop from teaspoon on a buttered sheet far enough apart to allow for spreading. Bake twelve to fifteen minutes over a high flame.
A very small batch of thin, brittle drop cookies — the whole thing scales up cleanly if you want more than a plateful. Two points in the original need translating before you start.
- "Over a high flame"Gas-range wording, most likely meaning oven heat rather than the stovetop, though the book never says so outright and gives no temperature. "High" would ordinarily point to a hot oven; because the batter is thin and sugar-light, 350-375F is a safer modern compromise, since anything hotter will darken the edges before the centres set.
- YieldAbout 18 to 20 small cookies from a teaspoon drop. They are meant to be little — roughly two inches finished, after spreading.
- SpacingThe instruction to allow for spreading is not boilerplate. With two tablespoons of butter and two of milk against half a cup of flour, this is closer to a batter than a dough, and the rounds will roughly double. Leave three inches between them.
- The peanutsPlain roasted peanuts, skinned and chopped, are the likelier intention here than the oiled, heavily salted cocktail kind. If yours are salted, cut the quarter-teaspoon of salt or leave it out.
- Baking powderA full teaspoon in half a cup of flour is a heavy hand by current standards, and it contributes to the spread. It works, but expect a lacy, crisp cookie rather than a puffed one.
- Lemon juiceA teaspoon and a half is the whole seasoning idea here, so use fresh juice. It reads as brightness against the peanuts rather than as lemon flavour.
- The sheet"Buttered sheet" means exactly that; parchment does the same job with less risk of the thin edges welding to the pan.
- DonenessTwelve to fifteen minutes is right for the size, but go by colour: pull them when the edges are brown and the centres still look pale. They firm as they cool and should be lifted off after a minute, not immediately.
Cookies of broadly this construction — creamed butter and sugar, one egg, half a cup of flour, chopped peanuts, a squeeze of lemon — appear in American cooking-school literature in the early twentieth century, and the wording here ("mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt; add to first mixture") is generally traced to the formula language associated with the Boston Cooking-School and Fannie Farmer's book. Peanuts were cheap, domestic and newly respectable in home baking then, having moved within a generation from circus and street-vendor fare to a pantry staple. The celebrity cookbook it appears in belongs to a genre that boomed in the 1910s and 1920s: film and stage performers contributing homely recipes, plausibly with the help of a studio publicity office, to make screen personalities seem like ordinary householders. For Lucille McVey, who built her career on domestic comedy, a plain drop cookie was very much on brand.