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Chocolate Cookies
1/2 cup butter, 1 tablespoon lard, 1 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 2 ounces melted Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1 egg, 1/2 teaspoon soda, 2 tablespoons milk, 2 1/2 cups flour. Cream the butter, add lard and cream together; then add gradually, while beating constantly, sugar, salt, cinnamon and chocolate. When thoroughly blended, add egg well beaten, soda dissolved in milk, and flour. Chill, toss on a slightly floured board, roll one-eighth inch in thickness, shape with a small round cutter first dipped in flour, arrange on a buttered tin sheet, and bake in a moderate oven.
A stiff rolled cookie dough rather than a drop cookie — the dough must be cold and thin, and the baking is brief. The original assumes you know when a moderate oven and a small round cutter mean.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, sold in cakes. Substitute 2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and cooled slightly so it does not curdle the butter.
- The lardOne tablespoon of lard alongside the butter keeps the rolled dough tender and slightly short. Leaf lard or shortening both work; using all butter gives a crisper, more brittle cookie.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. At one-eighth inch these bake in about 7 to 10 minutes; pull them when the edges are set and the centres still look faintly soft, as unsweetened chocolate hides the usual browning cues.
- Chilling is the hingeWith 2 1/2 cups flour to only 2 tablespoons milk, the dough is dry and will crack unless it is properly cold and firm. An hour in the refrigerator, rolled between sheets of parchment, saves the batch.
- Soda, not powderHalf a teaspoon of soda dissolved in milk is all the lift there is, and with little acid present beyond the unsweetened chocolate it works as much on spread and colour as on rise. Do not swap in baking powder expecting a puffier cookie.
- Buttered tin sheetParchment on an unbuttered sheet is better here; buttered pans encourage thin rolled cookies to spread and the sugar edges to catch.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield and specifies only 'a small round cutter'; at one-eighth inch expect several dozen. Re-roll scraps once only, working the trimmings cold.
Choice Recipes was one of a long line of promotional booklets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts rat to the partnership of Dr. James Baker and John Hannon in 1765, and by the late nineteenth century the best-known chocolate name in the United States. The booklets gathered contributions from cooking-school figures, Maria Parloa among them, which is why the phrasing here reads like a Boston Cooking School recipe: creamed fat, weighed ounces of chocolate, and the confident shorthand "a moderate oven." Premium No. 1 was the company's plain unsweetened cake, meant for cooking rather than eating, and the booklets existed to put more of it into American kitchens. The teaspoon of cinnamon echoes the older habit of spicing chocolate, a pairing long associated with Spanish and Spanish-colonial practice.