Home › Tempting Cocoanut Cookies › Vanilla Cookies
Vanilla Cookies
2 tablespoons butter. 1 cup sugar 2 eggs, beaten 1 tablespoon milk or cream 1 tablespoon vanilla extract 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 cups Dromedary Cocoanut Beat butter and sugar until creamy, add eggs, milk, vanilla, flour sifted with baking powder and cocoanut. Mix well and drop in pieces the size of a walnut on greased tins. Bake in a moderate oven.
A simple drop cookie from a coconut packer's promotional booklet, with one obvious gap: butter appears in the method but never in the ingredient list.
- The missing butterThe instructions open with "beat butter and sugar," but no quantity is given. For a dough with 2 cups flour and 1 cup sugar, about 1/2 cup (1 stick, 4 oz) softened butter is a reasonable reconstruction; the recipe gives no figure.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350°F (period usage for "moderate" ran to about 375°F). Coconut browns fast, so check at 10 minutes; 10 to 14 minutes total is usual for walnut-sized mounds.
- That tablespoon of vanillaNot necessarily a typo for the period; tablespoon quantities of flavouring appear regularly in recipes of this date, and extract strength was far less standardised. With modern extract, 1 to 2 teaspoons is likely enough; a full tablespoon may read as harsh.
- Dromedary CocoanutDried shredded coconut sold in packets. Sweetening of packaged coconut varied by brand and period, so the sugar level here is uncertain; modern sweetened flaked coconut will push these sweeter and make them spread and brown more, and unsweetened desiccated or flaked coconut is the safer substitution.
- Only a tablespoon of liquidCorrect as written. The eggs carry most of the moisture and the coconut absorbs a good deal, so the dough should be stiff and sticky rather than pourable. Resist adding more milk.
- Greased tinsParchment on a flat sheet is better here — the exposed coconut shreds catch and scorch on bare greased metal.
- YieldAbout 3 to 3 1/2 dozen cookies at walnut size. Space them 2 inches apart; they spread modestly.
Dromedary was the brand name used by the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for dates and for packaged shredded coconut, and this booklet is a piece of ingredient advertising rather than a general cookbook — hence "2 cups Dromedary Cocoanut" specified by brand in a list that forgets the butter altogether. Shredded coconut became a staple of American home baking once it could be reliably dried, packed and shipped, turning what had been a tropical luxury into a pantry item that kept. Cookies like these belong to the great early-twentieth-century vogue for the drop cookie: no rolling, no cutters, no chilling, just a stiff dough spooned onto a tin, which suited both the small household kitchen and the promotional leaflet's need for a recipe that could not easily fail.