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Sour Cream Cookies (Eggless) (Cups granulated sugar cups)
2 cups granulated sugar 2 cups sour cream 2 teaspoons soda (dissolved in hot water). ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Five Roses flour to make soft dough.
Roll out, cut and bake in hot oven.
Fine and economical when eggs are scarce.
A soft rolled cookie leavened entirely by soda reacting with the acid in sour cream. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what "soft dough" feels like, so the flour is left to judgment.
- The hinge: keep the dough softThe dough should stay slack and sticky, and rolled fairly thick it will puff into cakey rounds rather than crisp wafers; the original specifies no thickness. Adding flour until the dough handles cleanly will give you something dry and tough; flour the board and rolling pin generously instead, and chill the dough if it fights you.
- How much flourThe original gives none. Expect roughly 5 to 6 cups for this quantity of cream and sugar, added a cup at a time, but go by feel rather than the number.
- "Hot oven"In this period that means about 400 to 425F. At 400F, thick rounds take 8 to 10 minutes and should be pulled while still pale at the edges and barely set on top.
- Sour cream then and nowThe book most likely means naturally soured cream — thinner, tangier and more acidic than the modern product. Modern cultured sour cream is thicker and often stabilized with gums; full-fat is essential, and low-fat versions will make a gummy dough.
- The sodaTwo teaspoons is high by modern standards but correct here: there is no other leavening, no eggs, and a full two cups of acid cream to neutralize. Dissolve it in a tablespoon or so of hot water so it disperses evenly, and bake the dough reasonably promptly — the reaction begins on contact.
- No fat beyond the creamAll the tenderness comes from the butterfat in the cream, which is why the recipe suffers if you substitute anything lean.
- FinishingThe recipe calls for no glaze or egg wash; a sprinkling of granulated or cinnamon sugar before baking is an option if you want one.
- YieldAbout five to six dozen 2-inch cookies. The dough halves cleanly if that is more than you want.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its flour, and it collected recipes contributed by home cooks across Canada. The parenthetical "(Eggless)" and the closing line — "Fine and economical when eggs are scarce" — place this squarely in a household economy where eggs were seasonal and expensive, hens laying poorly through a Canadian winter long before year-round commercial production. Sour cream cookies belong to a broad family of North American soda-and-sour-milk baking that flourished from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when saleratus and later baking soda made it possible to leaven a batter with whatever soured dairy was already in the pantry. Nothing was wasted: cream that had turned was not spoiled but a raising agent waiting for its teaspoon of soda.