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Cocoanut Cream Cookies
1 cup butter (scant) 3/4 cup sugar 2 eggs, beaten 1/3 cup milk 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 3½ cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon powdered cinnamon Cream butter and sugar together, add eggs, milk, cocoanut and flour sifted with baking powder, salt and spice. Mix and roll one-third inch thick. Cut out with fancy cookie cutters, lay on greased tins and bake in a moderate oven for 15 minutes.
A plain rolled cookie dough enriched with shredded coconut, from one of the promotional booklets the Dromedary brand issued to sell its packaged product. It behaves like any butter roll-out dough, with two points needing translation.
- The flour quantityThe printed figure for flour is not a usable number. A dough with 1 cup butter, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 eggs and 1/3 cup milk takes roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups of flour to roll at a third of an inch; add it gradually and stop when the dough is firm enough to lift off the board without stretching.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F. Fifteen minutes at 350F suits a third-inch cookie; check at twelve, since coconut browns on the edges before the centre sets.
- Dromedary CocoanutThis was the brand's packaged shredded coconut, of the moist type generally sold in tins and cartons; it appears to have been sweetened, though the recipe does not say. Sweetened flaked coconut is the closest match. Unsweetened desiccated coconut will work but drinks up moisture, so expect to need a spoonful more milk.
- Chop the coconutLong shreds tear the dough as you roll and catch on the cutter. Give the cup of coconut a few passes with a knife or a short burst in a food processor before it goes in.
- Chill before rollingA scant cup of butter makes a soft dough. An hour in the refrigerator, wrapped, makes the third-inch thickness and the fancy cutters practical rather than a fight.
- SaltA full teaspoon is a lot by modern habit and reads as written for unsalted butter. If your butter is salted, cut this to half a teaspoon.
- YieldRoughly four dozen cookies from a two-inch cutter, though the count depends on how much flour you end up using. They keep a week in a tin and firm up as they sit.
Dromedary was a trade name of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for packaged dates and, from the early twentieth century, shredded coconut sold in tins and cartons. Before that, coconut meant buying the nut whole, cracking it, and grating the meat by hand, which would suggest that a ready-shredded product was a genuine convenience and worth a booklet of recipes to promote. Small cookbooks of this kind were given away free or sold for a few cents, and every recipe in them names the brand at least once. The cookie itself is unremarkable in form, and that is the point: a familiar rolled sugar cookie with cinnamon, adjusted just enough to require a cup of the sponsor's coconut.