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Sour Cream Cookies (Eggless) (Cup softened butter cups sour)
⅔ cup softened butter 1½ cups sour cream 2 cups sugar 1 teaspoon soda 4 cups Five Roses flour.
Stir butter and sugar together. Add the cream, then the flour in which the salt and soda have been well sifted together.
Add more flour if necessary. Keep materials all cold while rolling out and the cookies will require less flour.
A plain rolled cooky leavened only by soda working against the acid in the cream — no eggs, no baking powder, no baking instructions at all. The original assumes you know what to do with a sheet of rolled dough.
- The missing saltThe method tells you to sift salt with the flour and soda, but salt never appears in the ingredient list. Use 1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon for 4 cups of flour.
- No oven givenThe recipe gives neither temperature nor time. Rolled sour cream cookies of this kind are usually baked around 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just coloured and the centres still look pale.
- Sour cream then and nowAt the time this meant cream left to sour naturally, generally thinner than the cultured product sold today. Commercial full-fat sour cream works, but the dough will be stiffer; buttermilk thinned into it, or a spoonful of milk, brings it closer.
- Soda needs the acidThere is no baking powder here; the teaspoon of soda depends on the acid in the cream. By the usual rule of about half a teaspoon of soda to a cup of soured dairy there is if anything a little soda to spare, which is why low-fat or overly mild sour cream gives a flat, faintly soapy cooky. Do not substitute sweet cream.
- "Add more flour if necessary"Take this seriously but sparingly. Four cups is a starting point; the dough should be soft and only just rollable. Every extra cup of flour trades tenderness for convenience, which is exactly what the next sentence is warning against.
- Cold is the hingeThe instruction to keep everything cold is the whole technique. Chill the mixed dough at least an hour, roll one portion at a time and keep the rest in the refrigerator; cold dough releases from the board without being floured into toughness.
- Thickness and yieldRoll to about a quarter inch — thinner and the soda-raised crumb has nothing to lift. At a 2 1/2 inch cutter this batch gives roughly five to six dozen cookies.
- FinishingA sprinkle of granulated sugar over the rolled sheet before cutting, pressed in lightly with the rolling pin, is a common period touch.
Sour cream cookies belong to the era when a household with a cow or a standing cream order always had cream on the turn and no wish to waste it. Souring cream was not a fault but a stage: it went into cakes, pastry and cookies, where its acid gave the soda something to work against long before baking powder was cheap and reliable. The parenthetical "(Eggless)" is doing real work in a Canadian cookbook of this kind — eggs were the expensive, seasonal ingredient, and recipes that got their lift and richness from soured dairy instead were quietly valuable. Five Roses, the flour milled by Lake of the Woods Milling Company, distributed its cookbook as advertising from 1913 onward, and the collection is largely made up of contributions from Canadian housewives, which accounts for the compressed, assume-nothing-needs-saying style: no oven temperature, no baking time, no yield.